FAA Preliminary Report N9764U Grumman AA-5 Cheetah Daisetta, TX
Approximately 50 miles into the trip a catastrophic event caused the plane to fall from the sky. At 10:27 a.m., Hardin County Texas 911 Center received a call from a pilot of a small plane that had just crashed.
The pilot could not tell the dispatcher where he was located. Cell phone tracking put him somewhere in Sour Lake Texas. Additional calls eventually came in from a crop duster giving a general location of the incident.
Wow! That article has a lot of really detailed insight into how a small plane crash is actually worked by emergency crews.
I’d say the pilot is a very lucky man. He not only survived a serious crash, but was able to summon help. Without his mobile phone, he might have succumbed to his injuries before help arrived.
Very interesting story. Thanks, robbreid!
Very interesting.
I wonder the phone call coming in from the crop duster was from an ELT signal being received.
The airplane looked to be in pretty good shape after the crash. It almost looks like a Mooney in the picture.
My favorite part
a catastrophic event caused the plane to fall from the sky.
I’m no Carl Sagan, but I’d venture to say that gravity caused the plane to fall from the sky. I’m just sayin’…
And, as soon as the Gravity Research Foundation finds a cure for gravity, we will never hear of planes crashing again!!!
Support the Gravity Research Foundation!!!
good luck with that
Well, it looks like the Foundation has been successful in lightening wallets to the tune of a cool $1 million, so they must be on to something.
And I’m gonna start a foundation that will research what might happen if air moves. Who wants to donate??
Sorry. All my aviation research funding is tied up in conveyor belts.
Too funny! I nominate this for Post of the Year.
Thanks, wish I could take credit for it.
I’ll give you a dollar and be your biggest donar.
That’s an excellent story! (and the website’s pretty cool, too) It reminds me of last Saturday at a local airport when an experimental plane had a brake failure and flipped upside down off the end of the runway. Hearing “We’re off the end of one six, upside down, and we can’t get out. There’s fuel leaking too” come over the UNICOM was quite chilling.
Hats off to firefighters! They are probably some of our nation’s most unsung heroes. In the case of the crash I described, local firefighters simply drove their engines straight through the perimeter fence to get to the plane and trapped pilots quickly instead of driving around to the airport entrance.
Once had a fellow on VFR flight following disappear from the radar. Before we could start SAR he called on a landline from a GAS STATION to cancel his VFR FF and close out with the FSS and then told us why - he crashed.