A flight instructor and student pilot died in a fiery plane crash at a San Diego airport on Sept. 7, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) confirmed in its report.
Frederic Carl Hewett, 37, and Roger Shimizu, 45, died when a small Cessna airplane they were flying crashed and burst into flames on a runway at San Diego’s Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport.
NTSB on Thursday released its preliminary report, saying the crash happened during an instructional flight with a flight instructor and student pilot.
Hewett is listed online as an independent flight instructor who operates in San Diego. The FAA’s website lists the Cessna’s owner as the founder of Fly San Diego.
Preliminary ADS-B data showed the airplane departed the Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport in San Diego around 4:15 p.m. on Sept. 7. NTSB said the plane continued in the local airport traffic pattern for the whole flight, performing nine left-hand visual traffic patterns to runway 28L.
The plane was seen on airport and nearby business security cameras approaching the runway and performing multiple go-around maneuvers.
Witnesses reported seeing the plane flying erratically during the go-around maneuvers, “pitching upward steeply after the go-around was initiated, flying very slow, and ‘stalling’ before the airplane recovered.”
NTSB’s report said that on the plane’s ninth approach, it can be seen in videos “flying low near the ground as it approached the runway, nosing over, pitching up and then nosing over a second time” before entering a “steep nose high pitch attitude” just before the runway.
“The airplane appeared to attain about 45-degree pitch-up attitude while about 100 to 200 ft above ground level,” the report states.
The plane then did a steep left descending turn and hit runway 28L at 5:20 p.m. before coming to a rest on taxiway B and catching fire, NTSB reports.
NTSB said the wreckage was examined at the scene and no anomalies were found other than heavy damage to some of the plane’s components. The Cessna 172N was destroyed in the deadly crash.
The crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, the FAA and the San Diego Police Department.