An airplane is missing, with a last known position just south of Charlottesville, CBS-19 reports. After a trio of mayday calls, the plane disappeared from radar around 7:15pm, near Walton Middle School, about five miles south of Charlottesville. Pegasus is searching for wreckage, and Red Hill Road is closed to traffic. The airplane had departed from Lynchburg, thought to be destined for CHO.
We’ve had a few plane crashes in the area in recent years, with mixed outcomes. A 2001 crash at Wintergreen left a plane and a house’s deck destroyed, but the husband and wife in the airplane alive. One month later a Cessna collided with Humpback, killing the lone pilot and sparking a week-long, ten-acre forest fire. Then there was the Bundoran Farm crash in 2006, killing everybody onboard the small craft. Also in 2006 was the Rivanna Farm crash, with the plane’s pilot—the sole person in the plane—dying on impact. Finally, and most notably, was the 1959 crash of Flight 349 on Bucks Elbow, killing 26 people, but miraculously leaving a single survivor.
12:05am Update: WINA reports that the wreckage of the plane was found a couple of hours ago, and reports tentatively that one person is dead. No word on how many people were on board. Folks in the area tell WINA that they heard the crash.
10/25 12:20pm Update: The AP reports that a woman also died in the crash. There’s no word of survivors. Federal investigators are due on the scene today.
10/26 Update: The victims have been identified as Thomas Mahoney and Elizabeth Paris, of Orange. They were flying from Asheville (not Lynchburg).
When I was a kid in the late 70’s a small plane crashed up on the ridge of Carter’s Mountain, behind my folk’s house. I remember hiking up to see the wreck after they heard about it on the news… Not much left, just mangled metal.
I remember when the piedmont plane crashed on the mtn just above Crozet, October 1959, a cold rainy october Friday night. At first it was thought that the plane had crashed somewhere down around Lexington, or Buena Vista, and after a couple of days they concentrated there search on the site where the wreckage was found. Still remember the planes flying around the crash site. Victims were removed along an old fire road leading into the Shenandoah National Park on the west side of the mtn. Several months later I along with a couple of other friends walked up Jarmans Gap and over to the crash site. You could see the impact area very clearly and understand why no one survived (except for one, and he was really lucky to have survived). A few years ago I got a chance to meet the lone survivor at the memorial dedication at Mint Springs Park. Now a very old man, who was really lucky once upon a time. Its a nice memorial and folks should take the time to go to Mint Springs to see it.
There have been other local plane accidents/incidents. In August 2002 a plane flew into the Blue Ridge just west of Stanardsville:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20020906X01544&ntsbno=IAD02FA088&akey=1
You can look up pretty much every airplane incident since 1982 here:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp
The querying mechanism leaves a bit to be desired (one needs to know that the above crash was logged as occurring in Standardsville to find it, unless you want to pore over all accidents in Virginia.) But it’s an interesting way to pass some time, looking through them all (and then look up famous ones, like JFK Jr.: http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001212X19354&key=1)
It will be interesting to hear the NTSB report on this one … but don’t expect that for 6 to 12 months.