Two planes collided as they approached the runway of a suburban Atlanta airport Wednesday morning, leaving three people dead.
A flight instructor and her student were among those killed in the crash at West Georgia Regional Airport. Carroll County Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Richards said the two planes were both coming in at final approach and “set down on top of the other.”
“It appears one may not have seen the other one,” Richards said.
The female instructor and her male student were from a flight school in Newnan. The second plane contained a single male pilot. One aircraft was a Diamond Aircraft DA20C1 and the other was a Beech F33A.
Officials did not provide names of victims in the 10:54 a.m. crash, but a pastor and a childhood friend said the flight instructor was Taylor Stone, a Chattanooga native who lived in Newnan. The Associated Press identified the second victim as William Lewis Lindsey, 79, of College Park.
As a young girl, Stone knew she wanted to be a pilot when she grew up.
“Literally, she had said it since we were 7,” Adrianna Hemphill, a childhood friend, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And then she passes away doing what she loves.”
Hemphill and Stone were classmates from first through eighth grades at Lutheran School in Chattanooga before going to different high schools. Stone was a great student who worked hard, never hesitating to remind her family and friends of her ultimate goal, Hemphill said.
“It was so annoying,” Hemphill said, fondly. “We said, ‘We’ll see if she does, we’ll see.’ And then she did it.”
Stone attended Chattanooga Christian School and then Middle Tennessee State University before moving to Newnan, where she worked as a flight instructor for Falcon Aviation Academy.
“She was not going to let anybody stop her from doing what she wanted,” Hemphill said. “She had a great attitude always.”
In addition to her parents, Stone is survived by a younger sister.
The airport has no air-traffic controllers, and no control tower. Pilots communicate on a shared frequency.
“It’s basically non-controlled airspace. You report your movements as you come through,” Richards said.
Randall “Randy” Davis, senior vice president of Phoenix Air in Cartersville, said none of that is unusual. In fact for small airports it is the norm. Only 5 percent of all airports have control towers, he said, and it’s actually legal for small planes not to have radios on board, but very rare for them not to in this age of modern aviation. Davis’ airline flew aid and medical workers infected with Ebola to treatment centers in the U.S. during the height of the epidemic in Africa.
“Pilots are trained at 5 to 10 miles out to turn to a frequency called Unicom,” Davis said. “It’s like a party-line. What you do is dial in and listen and you’ll hear people talking about taking off or landing.”
At small municipal airports like the one in Carroll County, there is usually someone on the field called a Fixed Base Operator, who has many duties such as parking planes, selling fuel, performing maintenance and monitoring the Unicom radio, Davis said. That person can’t give a plane clearance to land, but he or she can tell a pilot the wind direction to help with landing. The operator can also tell the pilot if there are other planes on the runways.
“It’s just an advisory, they aren’t air traffic controllers and it works pretty well,” Davis said.
Even if there is no Fixed Base Operator on duty and on air — and it’s unclear whether there was one present at the time of Wednesday’s crash — pilots tell each other where they are to keep out of each other’s way as they approach an airport. It’s a practice called “see and avoid,” Davis said. “It’s the basic responsibility of every pilot.”
Carroll County Fire Chief Scott Blue said there was no fire when the planes crashed. He said it will take some work to identify the bodies because of the extensive damage.
The NTSB is securing the crash site and wreckage with plans to return in the morning. They will determine the cause of the crash. The FAA is also investigating.
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