Recordings may help probe of plane crash
RENTON, Wash. – Investigators will listen to recordings between an airport tower here and two planes involved in a midair collision in which a student pilot and instructor were killed, officials said Friday.
They hope the communications will help determine what caused a single-engine Cessna 152 and a deHavilland Beaver DHC-2 to collide Thursday over Interstate 405 northeast of Renton Municipal Airport, said Kurt Anderson, senior air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office on Friday identified the two killed as Chun Kit Ho, 25, and Kevin Germario Dukes, 26. Ho was from Seattle; Dukes was from Renton.
Ho, the student, and Dukes, the instructor, were Boeing Co. engineers. They were killed when the Cessna crashed through the roof of Kennydale Elementary School in this Seattle suburb. The two-story building is being remodeled but construction workers had left for the day about half an hour earlier, officials said.
Investigators also were coordinating to remove the plane from the school, Anderson said, noting that “some parts are on the roof and some might be down one more story.”
The second aircraft, a float plane that damaged its right pontoon in the collision, made an emergency landing beside a runway at the airport, located at the south end of Lake Washington. None of the five people aboard was hurt as the deHavilland skipped across the grass for about 150 yards and skidded to a halt.
“It’s the one bright spot in this,” said Bruce Fisher, operations manager at the airport.
Emergency landing
A family from Bend, Ore., escaped injury when their small plane made an emergency landing Friday in Lake Washington near Magnuson Park.
Seattle police spokeswoman Debra Brown said the pilot of the Cessna 185, his wife and their 9-year-old son made it out of the plane safely and were picked up by a nearby pleasure boat.
She said the pilot had radioed that the engine was cutting out and losing power and that he was attempting to land at the park, the site of a former Navy air station. A wheel caught the water and the plane nosed in and sank.
The family members, whose names were not immediately released, were on a trip from Idaho and had taken off from Spokane, heading for Boeing Field in Seattle.
The plane sank in about 40 feet of water about 200 yards from shore. Brown said divers checked the plane for fuel leaks and retrieved some personal items for the family, including a teddy bear.