The pilot and passenger of a single engine plane apparently escaped serious injury last evening after crashing their four-seater Mooney aircraft into the scrub oak and low brush just a couple hundred yards shy of the approach to runway 15 at the Martha's Vineyard Airport.
Police and ambulance crews from at least four Island towns responded, shortly after 6 p.m., to the scene at the border of the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest and the airport, finding a dismembered plane and two men, both conscious.
The discovery of airplane parts and other evidence at South Beach
this week confirms that two men traveling in a private plane that
disappeared 10 days ago were killed in a catastrophic crash in Vineyard
waters.
The land search for a plane carrying two people that is believed to
have crashed near or on Martha's Vineyard Tuesday night was
suspended yesterday afternoon at 3 p.m., pending new information.
For two long days and a night, local firemen, police and volunteers
combed the woods of the Island in search of the remains of a
single-engine airplane that went missing in foul weather. As the Gazette
went to press, there was still no trace of the plane.
A 54-year-old pilot was killed when a plane he had built himself
crashed south of the Vineyard on Saturday afternoon. Timothy L. Crawford
of Idaho Falls, Ida., was piloting a single-engined, two-seater Long-EZ
aircraft from Barnstable Municipal Airport when for no known reason the
plane crashed about four miles south of Long Point, West Tisbury.
An investigator into the Jan. 30 crash of a Cape Air plane in the
state forest this week released the transcript of the dialogue between
the pilot and air traffic controllers. It is still unknown what caused
the airplane crash that seriously injured both the pilot and passenger.
Federal and state investigators continue their inquiry into the
causes of a commuter airplane crash early Tuesday night in the Manuel F.
Correllus State Forest. Both the plane's pilot and its sole
passenger remain hospitalized.
In a chilling midsummer tragedy that made overnight headlines around the world and quickly put the Vineyard beneath the harsh spotlight of the national media, a small airplane flown by John F. Kennedy Jr. plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the western end of the Island on Friday night.
