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A small twin-engine plane crash-landed on runway 24 at the Flagler County Airport at 12:50 p.m. Tuesday after the plane’s landing gear failed. There are no reports of injuries. The runway is closed, but the airport is not.
The plane is a DA42, belonging to Embry-Riddle Aeronautic University. It was a training flight with two people on board, Flagler County Spokesman Carl Laundrie said. Neither was injured.
An identical Embry-Riddle plane flying over Palm Coast on Oct. 17 lost one of its doors, which crashed in the cul de sac of the C Section, near 16 College Court. No one was injured in that incident.
Numerous requests were made to Embry-Riddle for the N-Number, or plane identification number, of the DA42 involved in the October incident. Embry-Riddle refused to provide the number. The university has again refused to do so regarding the N-Number of the plane involved in today’s incident. We’re investigating a landing gear malfunction on one of our aircraft that landed at the Flagler Airport. There were no injuries. That’s all the information I have at the moment,” Embry-Riddle Spokesman James Roddey wrote in an email a little after 2 p.m.
Earlier today, two planes had been setting up to land behind the DA42 that crash-landed. One of them diverted to Daytona Beach, the other landed on Runway 29.
Ralph Treder, 68, a Palm Coast resident, was piloting the second plane, getting some refresher hours with an instructor, at the time of the incident. Treder said he heard the tower at the airport radio the plane whose gear had failed. “Sir,” the tower told the pilot of the other plane, according to Trader, “your landing gear collapsed, your nose gear collapsed.”
Trader was flying in from Palatka. It’s not yet clear where the other plane was flying in from, or how many people were aboard.
“He came on the frequency and told us we’ll have to change you to 29,” Trader said.
Flagler County Fire Rescue, Flagler Beach and Palm Coast Fire Department units at first staged near Highjackers Restaurant, then drove onto the tarmac to the plane, which was perpendicular to the runway at the point where it came to rest, not far from the airport tower.
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Incident occurred October 17, 2013:
Diamond DA42: Embry-Riddle Training Plane’s Door Crashes to Pavement at 16 College Court in Palm Coast
The cause of the mishap is unknown. It is the first time in recent memory that an Embry-Riddle training plane–the likes of which fly above Flagler routinely–has had any sort of accident.
“We are still investigating, and it’s going to be several days until we’re exactly sure what happened,” Embry-Riddle Spokesman James Roddy said. Many questions remain unanswered, including whether the Federal Aviation Administration will be investigating the mishap, and where the plane was. Roddy said he “assumed” it was grounded.
The plane is a Diamond DA42, which seats four, has a top speed of around 220 mph and a range of about 1,000 miles.
A resident of the C Section called 911 to report hearing a loud crash outside, and seeing what looked like a plane door siting in the road near 16 College Court. The plane was flying overhead. At 5:23 p.m., Embry-Riddle called local authorities to alert them that one of their planes had lost a door, and that the plane had landed safely. The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office turned the door over to university officials at Airport Director Roy Sieger’s request at 5:45 p.m.
“Witnesses,” a sheriff’s report found, “stated that they didn’t see it fall but heard the crash and went outside to see it sitting in the middle of the street. The falling door did not strike anything or anybody, other than the street, and it didn’t cause any damage to anything as a result.”
Embry-Riddle, Roddy said, conducts some 250 training flights a day.
“This is an incredibly rare event for us,” Roddy said. “In fact I had our director of aviation pull information, the last six and a half years we have flown 388,000 hours of flight, and we’ve had one accident in those six and a half years, and it was a bird strike. So these events for Embry-Riddle are incredibly rare. Safety is the absolute number one priority for us.” The identities of the pilot and the trainee were not released.
For Palm Coast and Flagler County, it is only the latest in a series of plane emergencies, some minor, one disastrous, this year.
The evening of March 13, a single-engine Piper on a training from Phoenix East flight school in Daytona Beach executed an emergency landing on Palm Coast Parkway, just west of Belle Terre. No one was injured, and only a semi truck sustained minor damage when the edge of the plan’s left wing clipped a part of the cab. In April, an experimental plane crashed into Lake Disston at the west end of the county. Its two occupants swam safely to shore.
On Jan. 5, three people aboard a BE35 aircraft died when the plane crashed into a house on Utica Path in Palm Coast, just short of the runway at the Flagler County Airport. The plane had developed engine troubles minutes earlier. The house was virtually demolished by fire, but its occupant survived unharmed.
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