The plane that crashed onto I-285 in DeKalb County earlier this month was moving “extremely slow” before plummeting onto the busy interstate, a witness told investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board.
That witness, who was not identified in the NTSB’s preliminary report on the accident released Tuesday, said he was about 2,300 feet off the departure end of the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport runway when he “stopped to look at the airplane because it was moving extremely slow and only 75-100 feet above ground level when it went over his head,” according to the report.
“He went on to say that the engine sounded normal and despite the slow speed, the airplane was not ‘wobbling’ left to right,” the NTSB report said.
The single-engine Piper PA-32R-300 crashed into the eastbound lanes of I-285 around 10:10 a.m. May 8, disintegrating into a fireball against the concrete median wall about two miles north of the air field.
Killed were Greg Byrd and his sons, Christopher Byrd and Phillip Byrd, as well as Christopher Byrd’s fiancée Jackie Kulzer.
The Byrd family was from Asheville, N.C., while Kulzer was a graduate of metro Atlanta’s St. Pius X High School. She and Christopher Byrd had planned to marry in October.
The four were en route to Oxford, Miss., where Greg Byrd’s youngest son, Robert, was graduating. Greg and Phillip Byrd had departed Asheville that Friday morning and made a stop at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport to pick up his other son and Kulzer.
The preliminary NTSB report released Tuesday did not suggest any reasons for the crash, only saying that the pilot radioed to air traffic controllers that he was “having some problem climbing here,” followed by an ominous final transmission: “we’re going down here at the intersection.”
No motorists were injured when the plane plummeted onto the busy highway just after the morning rush hour.
“It’s literally a miracle that no other cars were hit or severely impacted,” DeKalb County fire Capt. Eric Jackson said at the scene.
The crash prompted authorities to shut down all lanes of I-285 in both directions. Traffic on I-285 westbound resumed after about three hours, but it was five hours before the eastbound lanes were reopened to traffic.
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