LANTANA — Jonathan Sands tried to land at the Lantana airport just one time, but it was memorable: He ended up upside down in his RV6 aircraft after it flipped over close to the airport fence, just across Congress Avenue from the Atlantis Grill & Bar.
Sands blames himself for trying to land too fast and, perhaps, bad fuel that could have choked power from his engine.
But he couldn’t blame the airport.
“The runways are normal length,” he said. “For the type of aircraft they fly, it’s fine.”
After a crash Tuesday killed college student Banny Galicia in a suburban Lake Worth mobile home and pilot Dan Shalloway, who appears to have been maneuvering his Piper Cherokee 180 to land at Lantana airport, it may seem as though Lantana has attracted more than its share of crashes.
But National Transportation Safety Board figures don’t bear that out.
Since 1982, the Palm Beach County Park Airport west of the town limits has been linked to 48 crashes involving 51 aircraft, not counting Tuesday’s crash. The crashes killed 17 people and seriously injured nine.
Those numbers hew closely to those at the North Perry General Aviation Airport in Hollywood, which is about as busy as Lantana. It had 53 crashes that killed 17 people and seriously injured seven during the same period.
Jacksonville Executive at Craig Airport has more general aviation flights but was responsible for 13 deaths and five serious injuries in 47 crashes during that time.
All three of those airports are close to commercial airports along the densely populated Florida coast. North Perry is at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
The Palm Beach County Park Airport is the 14th busiest in the state for general aviation flights. It typically logs hundreds of flights a day, mostly from small planes and helicopters. Its runways, in a World War II-era design, are set up in an A shape. Each is roughly 3,400 feet long.
Teaching flights accounted for 21 of the 51 crashed aircraft and three of the 17 deaths. Thirteen deaths were on flights listed as personal.
Lantana’s crashes often have nothing to do with the airport itself.
In several crashes, engines lost power when airplanes were just barely off the ground. Others never never left the ground at all.
A string of crashes tied to the airport shows how the airport itself never had a chance to play a role. In August 2009, a student pilot and his instructor discovered they couldn’t pull their control stick back far enough to take off. One of the adjustable seats had slid forward, preventing them from having full control. Their plane came to a stop in bushes beside a lake.
Just a few months earlier, two people died when an engine cut out about 100 feet above ground. Investigators found the engine had not been completely reassembled after extensive repairs.
In November 2008, a critical nut came off a helicopter’s engine, but two people escaped serious injury. The pilot lost power, missed power lines and glided down to a crash that cut the tail off the helicopter. In that case, too, the engine did not appear to have been fully reassembled.
In October 2007, two people were killed and another seriously injured when pilots tried to keep drawing fuel from an empty tank. With a dead engine, the pilots tried to land on a golf course but hit trees. Half of the airplane’s fuel was still on board.
And in June 2007, a pilot escaped serious injury when his hydraulic system leaked and he couldn’t get his landing gear down.
It’s not clear yet what happened Tuesday when Shalloway, a prominent engineer, was flying alone from the Orlando area toward the Lantana airport at about 5:30 p.m. In a span of 14 seconds, his small plane veered sharply off course.
Video from a nearby store showed it flew through the air on its side before crashing into the Mar-Mak Colony Club mobile-home park off Lake Worth Road and bursting into flames. Galicia was the sole victim on the ground.
Sands, who crashed at Lantana in August 2014, began losing power on a flight from Kissimmee, so he decided to try to land at Lantana. He said he landed too fast and swerved near the end of the runway to avoid hitting the fence, and the airplane flipped. Test results on his fuel were inconclusive.
He’s back in the air in a different plane, now, but hasn’t tried again to land at Lantana. But it’s not anything to do with the airport itself. It’s simply out of the way for him.
“Lantana airport, there’s nothing wrong with the airport per se,” Sands said.
Notable crashes
The Palm Beach County Park Airport at Lantana is tied to 48 accidents involving 51 aircraft since 1983, the National Transportation Safety Board says. Among them:
January 2015: A Piper Cherokee collides with a Robinson R22 helicopter when both came in to land at the same time.
December 2014: Instructor killed and a student injured in an R22 helicopter. “We’re going down,” the student recalled the instructor saying. In a lawsuit, he claimed the instructor was using the FaceTime video conferencing software.
December 2012: A two-engine Cessna 421C started to take off, and ultimately rolled left and went straight into the ground. The NTSB says an engine failed and the pilot, who died, didn’t follow proper procedures to regain control.
April 2010: Engine on a homebuilt plane stops after takeoff. It crashed into a lake a few hundred yards away. The pilot was killed.
May 2009: An airplane that hadn’t been used much since heavy repairs quit just 100 feet into the air. The pilot turned back toward the airport, then crashed into two planes and a truck on the ground. The pilot and a passenger died.
October 2007: An 18-year-old pilot on a night-time instructional flight lost power over Boynton Beach while finishing a flight to Lantana. The flight instructor ordered the pilot to land on a golf course, but the plane hit trees and cartwheeled. The crash killed the pilot and the instructor. A passenger, who was seriously injured, said both pilots were focused on finding a place to crash and not on restoring power. The plane had been set to draw fuel from a now-empty tank; the other tank had plenty of fuel.
May 2006, two people were seriously injured when their Mooney M20G lost power after climbing just 100 feet. The NTSB said the pilot hadn’t checked the fuel and a rotted seal let rainwater into the tank.
- Source: http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com
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