While a Dec. 8 plane crash in Gaithersburg that killed six drew much attention to pilot and aircraft safety, Prince George’s airports have historically had few incidents, and local pilots say a similar accident is unlikely to happen in the county.
“That’s such a freak accident; I don’t think anything like that would happen like that here, but you never know,” said Tyler North, 21, of College Park. “I wasn’t immediately concerned like, is there going to be a plane that crashes here in College Park, I was more concerned about if everybody was okay in Gaithersburg.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is still working to determine what caused a small jet carrying three individuals to crash into a residential neighborhood, claiming the lives of a woman and her two children as well as the plane’s pilot and passengers.
Out of around 160 aircraft accidents in Maryland over the past decade, about 14 took place in Prince George’s, according to data provided by NTSB. Of those incidents, three included fatalities and three included only injuries.
Andrew Bowers, a manager at Freeway Airport in Bowie, said most of the airports in Prince George’s only handle propeller planes, which are generally smaller and easier to maintain than jets like the one that crashed in Gaithersburg.
Freeway runs a flight school and owns about 40 small planes, which are inspected every 50 and 100 flight hours, Bowers said.
“[Our planes] have a lot less moving parts than a jet. The jets have a lot of fans and big compressors,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about maintaining the pressure and all that kind of stuff.”
The Freeway planes are sometimes visible flying low over U.S. 301 in Bowie, and Bowie resident Jennifer Navarro said that sometimes makes her nervous.
“I don’t like that at all,” she said. “I don’t like that just riding on [U.S. 301]. It bothers me a lot.”
Navarro, who lives about five miles from the Freeway Airport, said the thought of a plane going down near her house has never been a concern, and that a train derailment seems like more of a threat.
Bowie was founded on rail transportation and contains many miles of active track — part of which falls near Navarro’s home, she said.
Bowers said each flight school participant is accompanied by a pilot with thousands of hours of experience, and that instructors have complete access to airplane controls.
Jack Robson of College Park has been flying private planes for 40 years and confirmed that the type of planes utilizing Prince George’s airfields are typically smaller gasoline-powered planes.
“What crashed [on Dec. 8] was a jet and jets typically have different handling characteristics. They tend to have to be flown faster, so it takes them longer to stop,” Robson said. “Because our planes are smaller and lighter, they fly more slowly and they can be stopped much faster.”
But Stan Fetter, a pilot and manager of Hyde Field/Washington Executive Airpark in Clinton, said the type of aircraft being flown is less relevant than the decision of the individual pilot and the soundness of the plane.
“It’s not a lot different from a car wreck,” Fetter said. “Whether it’s a jet or not isn’t really the issue. [The Gaithersburg crash] is a very isolated incident and it’s probably going to come down to something between the pilot and the aircraft.”
While Prince George’s airport representatives stressed that residents have no cause for alarm, they did mention one development that is a bit worrying to pilots in the area.
A new 11-story hotel and conference center planned for U.S. Route 1 in College Park would fall very close to the flight path of pilots coming in for a landing at the College Park airport, Fetter said. There also are multiple-story student housing buildings near the College Park flight path, he said.
“The question isn’t ‘if’ somebody’s going to hit one of those buildings, it’s ‘when,’ because it’s in a bad spot,” Fetter said. “That’s the thing that’s going to cause a lot more wrecks.”
Source: http://www.gazette.net
NTSB Identification: DCA15MA029
14 CFR Part 91: General Aviation
Accident occurred Monday, December 08, 2014 in Gaithersburg, MD
Aircraft: EMBRAER EMB-500, registration: N100EQ
Injuries: 6 Fatal.
This is preliminary information, subject to change, and may contain errors. Any errors in this report will be corrected when the final report has been completed. NTSB investigators traveled in support of this investigation and used data obtained from various sources to prepare this aircraft accident report.
On December 8, 2014, about 1041 Eastern Standard Time (EST), an Embraer EMB-500 Phenom 100, N100EQ, impacted terrain and houses about 0.75 miles short of runway 14 while on approach to Montgomery County Airpark (GAI), Gaithersburg, Maryland. The airline transport rated pilot and two passengers were fatally injured as well as three persons on the ground. The airplane was destroyed during the impact and ensuing fire. Marginal visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time and the flight was operating on an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plan. The airplane was registered to and operated by Sage Aviation LLC., of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 as a personal flight. The flight originated from Horace Williams Airport (IGX), Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with GAI as its intended destination.
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