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Montana Fan
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Boston
Posts: 214
M.O.C. #6052
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Airplane Crash Into RV Park - Ocala Florida
Hello:
This just came accross the local TV Channel:
OCALA - A small home-built airplane crashed into the Wild Frontier RV Park in northwest Ocala at about 3 p.m. Friday.
Ocala Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Brian Stoothoff said the pilot was killed in the crash. He said no one was inside either of the two recreational vehicles hit by the small fixed-wing aircraft. There was only one confirmed fatality.
The call came in at 2:56 p.m., Stoothoff said, and firefighters were on scene at 2:57 p.m. They found heavy fire and smoke from the burning aircraft and two adjacent RVs.
Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Mike Thomas said he was on Magnolia Avenue when he saw a plane going east to west and then heard a pop. Then, Thomas said, he saw the wings tip several times back and forth.
Then the plane turned north and rapidly descended out of his line of sight.
Thomas got in his patrol car and called dispatch. By that time, Thomas said he saw black smoke rising quickly.
He arrived at the scene - 3101 N.W. Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. - and saw Marion County sheriff's deputies and local fire officials already there.
Ocala police Capt. Richard Edwards said a positive identification has not been made on the body of the pilot. It will be made using dental records or fingerprints.
Police officers were waiting to hand the scene over to the Federal Aviation Administration. Edwards said the National Transportation Safety Board will not investigate the crash.
The pilot Friday afternoon was not John A. Hambleton, the name under whom the plane was registered, according to Jimmy Leeward, a local pilot and owner of Leeward Air Ranch, who said he spoke with an officer of one of the area aviation organizations of which Hambleton is a member.
The person flying the plane Friday was a "test pilot," Leeward said when reached at his home Friday evening. "He was just flying it for the owner."
He also said the plane was coming from Hambleton's private airstrip in Ocala.
EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNTS
Frances Lynch, a winter resident from St. Joseph, Mo., was in an RV belonging to her and her husband just 20 to 25 yards from the crash site.
Lynch said she was inside their RV in the kitchen area when she heard a big boom. When she looked out the kitchen window, she saw a large ball of fire.
She said the explosion lifted both RVs at the crash site up into the air.
"Oh, my God, the motor home is blown up," Lynch remembered saying.
"If it would have come straight," she said, "we would have been hit."
Lynch said there is 4- to 6-inch hole knocked in the back of their RV, as if a projectile struck it.
Ann Moore said she was in an RV next to one of the two that got burned during the crash. She had just gotten out of the shower when she heard a loud explosion that shook the ground.
Moore said she looked outside and saw something silver. She immediately got dressed, grabbed her cell phone and car keys and went outside.
Moore said someone told her to quickly move her vehicle away from the crash site, which she did.
"It was such a horrible noise," Moore said. "It scared me so bad."
Also at the RV park, Cathy Cooper said she was sitting on a porch about 100 yards away from where the crash occurred.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a fireball and an explosion. She and her husband and others got up and ran toward the crash to see if they could help. But, she said, the fire "was too hot."
"It happened so fast," said Cooper, who was still visibly shaking. Cooper said she and her husband had spent the night in the park.
Tony Kubis, an employee at the RV park, said he was driving a golf cart when he heard a loud bang and saw smoke. He drove toward the smoke and saw the tail of what looked like a vintage airplane.
He said there was a man trying to get to his RV near the fire because he was concerned about his dog inside. The man did back out his RV.
At about that time, Kubis said, there were several more explosions, and he got everybody to move back.
THANKFUL HE WASN'T HOME
Geoffrey Blain, who owns one of the trailers destroyed in the plane crash, said he's grateful to be alive.
"I was just in total shock. I'm just thankful that I'm alive," Geoffrey Blain, a U.S. Army Vietnam veteran who has been staying at the RV park for about a month.
Blain, who said he and his wife live in Michigan, said he left the park around 8:30 a.m. to go visit a friend. His wife had gone back to Michigan to visit.
If they had been in the RV, he said, they probably would not have survived.
"I'm just really lucky I wasn't here," Blain said.
When he came back to the park between 4:15 and 4:30 p.m., he was first told that he couldn't enter the area where the accident had occurred. Officials asked him which trailer was his.
He told them, he said, and then he got the sad news. Blain said a lot people in the park have come to him and told him they're glad he's alive.
AN S-51
Kathleen Bergen, communications manager for the FAA in Atlanta, said the aircraft was a home-built S-51 experimental aircraft registered to John A. Hambleton, of Ocala.
The Stewart 51, or S-51D, as it is commonly known, is an all-aluminum replica of the North American P51-D Mustang at about 70 percent scale, according to the Experimental Aircraft Association. It is about 22 feet long, 9 feet tall and has a 26-foot, 9-inch wingspan.
The planes, commonly called "experimental aircraft," are sold as kits to plane enthusiasts, who have to assemble them. Ray Larner, who owns the manufacturing rights to the plane through his company Scaled Replicas LLC, of Lapeer, Mich., said about 60 of the S-51 kits were sold into the late 1990s, although only about 14 or 15 are in the air today.
Larner bought the rights to manufacture the kits about two years ago but has not "done anything with it yet," he said.
"The owner has to put together the power plant, the prop and the gearbox," Larner said. "So how the aircraft is constructed and how it comes out is the responsibility of the owner."
The FAA examined Hambleton's finished S-51 and certified it airworthy on May 17, 2002.
Leeward, the local pilot, said the S-51D is "a very well-designed and excellent airplane."
An unidentified man who answered the phone at the Hambleton home declined to answer questions about the mishap.
"We'll have no comment at this time, but thank you for your call," the man said.
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