The pilot of a single-engine Cessna 210 that crashed Sunday night on Detroit's east side, killing two people and critically injuring one, reported an "anomaly" with the plane's landing gear and a fuel emergency just before the accident, an aviation investigator said.
Federal officials launched an investigation Monday to determine what caused the aircraft to crash upside down on a grassy lot on Milton, just west of Van Dyke.
Police said a 54-year-old man and a 48-year-old woman were killed. A 17-year-old male is in critical condition at Detroit Receiving Hospital. Authorities have not publicly identified the victims.
Andrew Todd Fox, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters that the plane was en route from Arkansas when the pilot reported problems in the minutes before a scheduled landing at around 8 p.m. at Coleman A. Young International Airport.
Fox said the plane received clearance to land on the airport's runway 33. Soon after, the pilot said that one of the landing gear mechanisms was not extended, or only partially extended.
"The controller offered the pilot to fly by the control tower," Fox said. "He did that. They confirmed that they did not see all three landing gear extended."
Fox said the pilot asked to circle the airport to troubleshoot the landing gear problem. Soon after, he reported being low on fuel or out of fuel. There were no further communications between the plane and air traffic control.
Fox said investigators will need to comb through the crash site and various pieces of data before being able to conclude what happened.
"We don’t have any conclusions or any kind of probable cause of the accident," he said.
Investigators are expected to be on the scene for a couple of days. A preliminary report is expected late this week or early next week. A final report could take more than a year to complete.
"We will be looking at several things, including whether there was anything mechanical wrong with the aircraft, that includes landing gear information or fuel (information)," said Keith Holloway, spokesman for the NTSB. "We will also be looking at air traffic control communications and radar data."
Federal Aviation Administration records show the plane was registered to Gregory Boaz of League City, Texas. Boaz has an unlisted phone number.
Records also show the plane was built in 1978 and was purchased in April.
Fox said the plane made a fuel stop Sunday afternoon in West Memphis, Ark. The pilot requested 60 gallons of fuel. The plane has an 89-gallon usable fuel capacity, Fox said. The plane departed Arkansas at about 4:42 p.m. Detroit time.
Fox said the pilot had 650 hours of flight time as of his last medical examination and did not have an instrument rating.
Fox said it appears the plane struck two trees about 250 feet from where the aircraft came to rest. The branches brought down a power line on Milton.
One challenge in assessing what happened is the plane's extensive fire damage, he said.
On Monday morning, Detroit police officers kept watch over the taped-off scene in an area with several vacant lots and unoccupied homes. The charred, wrecked plane's front end was ripped apart and crumbled.
Neighbors who heard the crash ran over and tried to pull people from the wreckage.
Larry Whitfield, 72, who lives around the corner, ran outside and saw that the crashed plane was on fire.
"One guy, big guy, by a window couldn’t get out and he couldn’t breathe. I had a stick. Didn’t work, so another guy got an ax," Whitfield said
With the crowd yelling at them that the plane was about to explode, Whitfield said he and the other man used the ax to break out the window and then open the plane’s door.
At one point, one passenger got out and emergency rescue personnel began working on him, Whitfield said, but the others could not escape.
Whitfield said he looked in as closely as he could and said the big guy he had tried to help “had to be dead, his legs was all burned up.”
When asked if he felt like a hero, Whitfield said "anybody would have done it."
Contact staff writer Ann Zaniewski at 313-222-6594 or azaniewski@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @AnnZaniewski.
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