Flight investigators still need to determine what caused the plane piloted by flight instructor Ron Royce to go down yesterday afternoon in the Tiger Creek area of Carter County.
Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, as well as the Carter County Sheriff’s office have been on scene since yesterday, investigating the crash that took the lives of pilot Royce and his passenger, Adam West.
Royce was reported to be an extremely experienced pilot who trained hundreds, if not thousands, of students for Moody Aviation before the company relocated, and since.
Sheriff Mathes said the plane took off from the Elizabethton Municipal Airport on a training exercise where West was learning how to fly at low altitude. During that training, the plane crashed into the ridge line before falling from the sky.
According to investigators, there were 90 gallons of fuel on-board the plane when it crashed and they believe that fuel was responsible for the massive fire that followed. The plane was also at maximum weight, common for training exercises.
The airplane’s engine will be transported to the Elizabethton airport for inspection and possibly back to the manufacturer for further analysis. The plane, a single-engine Cessna 206, crashed Thursday at 3:15 p.m. some 8 miles from the Elizabethton airport, identification numbers at the time of the crash were burnt off the tail section.
Butch Wilson, NTSB, said the plane's propeller did not experience very much damage- indicating that the plane's engine was not generating much power while in flight. However, he can't say yet if the engine failed before the plane crashed. Wilson says the 1975 model airplane is a very good aircraft.
Small planes such as this one do not have black boxes or flight recorders on board. That makes it harder for investigators to figure out what happened. The NTSB will look into the plane's maintenance records and interview family members as part of its investigation and it has not ruled out a medical emergency yet as a possible cause.
Although it could take a full year to complete the NTSB’s report, they expect to release preliminary findings in as soon as 10 days.
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