Other recent accidents involving DeKalb-Peachtree Airport
May 17, 2014: A Chance Vought/FAU4 with only the pilot aboard veered off the runway at the airport. No serious injuries were reported. The NTSB attributed the accident to pilot error. The pilot, 56, failed to maintain directional control during the landing, it concluded.
May 23, 2013: A Beech/A36 with five people on board crashed shortly after taking off for Venice, Florida. A cellphone video taken by a passenger showed that the stall warning horn sounded after the pilot rotated the plane for takeoff. No deaths or serious injuries were reported. The NTSB attributed the crash to pilot error, saying the 53-year-old failed to account for crosswinds, tail wind and high-density altitude conditions in his preflight planning. As a result, the airplane's climb performance was degraded and its nose was pitched up, leading to the stall.
July 1, 2012: The 62-year-old pilot of a Beech/58 with a passenger aboard was doing a touch-and-go landing when he intended to retract the flaps but instead selected the landing gear control lever. That retracted the landing gear during the landing. No serious injuries were reported.
June 18, 2012: A Beech/400A ran off the end of a runway after landing at the airport, then went through a fence before stopping near Dresden Drive. The pilot and co-pilot were seriously injured; the two passengers suffered only minor injuries. As the plane was approaching the airport, the controller advised the pilot of another plane in the area. Contrary to instructions from the controller, the plane descended to land. As it came in, the plane's ground proximity warning system sounded "pull up pull up" several times. But the crew performed no maneuvers and the plane crashed. Among the errors the NTSB cited was the pilot and co-pilot's failure to do a pre-landing checklist, which, while not required, is "universally recognized as basic safe aviation practices," the NTSB concluded. It also said the flight crew showed poor communication and lack of situation awareness.
March 7, 2012: The pilot of a Piper/PA-31-350 escaped serious injury when birds hit the top center section of the windscreen, shattering it, and entered the cockpit. The pilot managed to return to the airport.
Oct. 17, 2011: A Cessna/172F that had departed from Hilton Head, S.C., hit the ground in the backyard of a house in DeKalb County after it ran out of fuel. A passenger was seriously injured. News reports said the passenger was the pilot's 11-year-old son. NTSB said the probable cause of the accident was the pilot's inadequate preflight planning.
Jan. 29, 2011: The pilot of a Piper/PA-28-161 had received clearance from a controller to cross a runway intersection when he mistakenly turned into a grassy area. The plane's right wing hit a sign. NTSB determined that the cause of the accident was the pilot's wrong turn. No serious injuries were reported.
Source: National Transportation Safety Board
Even though they were strangers to the local flying fraternity, Greg Byrd and his family were foremost in the thoughts of pilots flying into and out DeKalb-Peachtree Airport Saturday morning.
Just 24 hours earlier, Byrd, his sons Christopher and Phillip and Christopher's fiancee Jackie Kulzer, had taken off from the Chamblee airport for a 90-minute flight to the University of Mississippi to see his youngest son, Robert, graduate. Within minutes Byrd, a former Asheville-area sheriff's deputy, radioed that his Piper Lance — similar to the plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 — was "going down." The aircraft slammed into a median on I-285 minutes near Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, killing all four passengers.
“It’s a reality check,” said Marcus McAvoy, who had just completed a 33-minute flight from his home in Washington, Ga. to PDK. “It’s a reminder that you don’t want to get complacent. Complacency kills.”
McAvoy was not inferring that pilot error led to Friday’s crash, which brought traffic to a standstill for several hours. It’s a mystery investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board hope to unravel, but the condition of the wreckage makes that unlikely, according to aviation experts.
Whatever happened in the air, Byrd was left with limited landing options due to DeKalb-Peachtree’s urban setting.
Taking off from PDK is “sort of scary,” said Atlanta pilot Robert Young.
“There’s really not many places to go” if an emergency landing is required, said Brian Michael, a 38-year-old computer programmer from Stone Mountain who has flown into PDK dozens of times.
When Michael takes off in his 1959 Piper Comanche, a high-performance single-engine airplane, “I’m just basically trying to get as high as I can as quickly as I can, because altitude is your friend,” he said.
Still, pilots interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said they feel safer in the air than behind the wheel.
The numbers back them up. The National Safety Council recently compiled an “odds-of-dying” table which found the chances of dying in car accident to be 1 in 98 over a lifetime. For air and space travel, the odds were 1 in 7,178.
But plane crashes grab the headlines.
In the past two weeks alone, accidents involving small aircraft have killed at least six people and injured a number of others, including a Cumming man hurt when his plane crashed in Bartow County earlier this week. On Thursday, two men on an experimental test flight died after trying to make an emergency landing in their Piper PA 46-350P aircraft just north of a Spokane, Washington.
“I don’t consider it as dangerous as riding down 285 with two people beside me on their cell phones,” said John Morgan, of Atlanta, who had just flown his 20-year-old home-built airplane, an RV6A, from DeKalb Peachtree to Briscoe Field near Lawrenceville.
And air travel has gotten much safer. In the 1970s, there were more than 4,000 a year such incidents. In 2013, the number of crashes — 1,222, with 387 fatalities — reached an all-time low, according to the NTSB.
“We know the perils, but life is not a guarantee,” said Joel Levine, 72, of Dunwoody, who had been flying since 1959 until selling his Beechcraft Musketeer three years ago. Flying “is not without its concerns,” he said. “but we train to be prepared for that.”
Rickman Brown, who’s been flying for 27 years, said he is comforted by the fact that a great majority of crashes are preventable.
“That’s why I’m so careful,” said Brown, who flew his Piper Cheyenne II Saturday just to “keep sharp and current.” “I try to fly to the same standards as a working pilot. It’s not prudent to ever let down your guard.”
Friday’s crash was a “terrible blow,” said Brown, ” but I feel no different about flying today than I did yesterday.”
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