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HomeMy WebLinkAbout02 16 1990 Another airplane falls from the sky;A!STLAN. F ruary 16, 1990 (USPS 1506) Another'air PI A lone fireman inspects wreckage of the second airplane crash in two weeks along Roseland Road. Sun photo by Dan CLA, OUJN/- Your Hometown Published Every Friday 2 sections 20 pages 25 tents anefalls'from. m . _ Ad"C'" i d rats stun area _residents ! • Jyr •. if ah _ 1 Sun staff reporter. . For the second time in as many weeks, a Roseland neighborhood has had a close encounter with airplanes i • crashing • _ '"+� Wednesday, three passengers walked away from a crash-landing on Roseland Road, after their single- t engine plane developed engine trouble. On Feb. 3, two planes crashed in the same area, near River's Edge, after a mid -air colli- sion that left the pilot of one plane dead and the pilot of the other in 0 serious condition. The neighborhood kids came to - the rescue when they saw the air- plane in trouble at .about 5:20 Wednesday afternoon. -"I was MQ 4l w the propeller' stop in tht;4w," Sty Matt Falzon, 13. He was new his •fam- . _;.- - ily's house on Roseland Road, and started pedaling home as fast as he could. SeOCjash on page 5-A Crash (from page 1-A) "I was inside, looking out the window, talking to a friend on the phone," explained his sister Jessica, 14. "First I heard four explosions in the air. There was one and then three in a row: boom, boom -boom -boom. Then I saw it come in low and it looked like it was trying to land on the road." - The plane, a Piper 11 single engine four -seater, was coming in from the northeast. It just cleared the power lines running along the north side of the road and swooped down to the pavement. Jessica told her friend, James Suchi, to hang up and call the Fire Department. She called 911. Then she went out to see if she could help. By now Jessica knows what to do in these cases. It was the second time in 1 I days she'd been an eye witness to an airplane accident close to her house. On Feb. 3 she'd looked up and seen Roger Cooper, through the cockpit window, just before his plane flew into the tail of the plane Jeffrey Dimond was piloting. She saw both planes go down. Dimond, a Florida Institute of Technology stu- dent, died. Cooper, a local resident, is still in serious condition in an Orlando hospital. "I'm happy this time, because nobody died," -stated Jessica. But her mother, Kathleen Falzone, looked at the damaged plane in the shrubbery by the entrance to River's Edge ,subdivision and remarked, "That's right where the kids get the school bus." Art Hegenbart pitched in and helped too. A resident on Sunset Drive in, .River's. Edge, he and his wife were driving home on Roseland Road after dining out at Marker II. "We were almost home when I saw the plane above me," Hegenbart re- called. "`He's awful low,' I said to my wife. And when we got around the curve, there it was on the road right in front of us. He'd turned it to the right of the road, I guess because of the power lines going across 'the road ahead of him , or traffic coming. And the right wing caught the stop sign at the entrance of River's Edge - that jerked the plane so it swung around hard to the right, into the palm tree and the bushes in front of Le- onhardt's house. "Two seconds sooner, and we'd have met the plane at the entrance- way. It stopped just a foot short of Leonhardt's boat, and about fifteen feet from his house. He told me his house was full of gas fumes. He was taking a shower, and came out of his house with a towel wrapped around him. "After I parked my car, I got out and directed traffic. "My wife just had a major operation for cancer, and this is not doing her any good. She's been very upset." Steve Johnson arrived at the scene about three minutes after the crash landing. He operates Sebastian Aero Services at the airport, and is ac- quainted with the plane's pilot, Christos Nodaras, and the plane's other two occupants, Kostantinos Svolopoulos and Panaglotis Voul- garis. (All three' are citizens of Greece, taking advanced flight train- ing at Pro Flite in Vero Beach.) "They've been in and out of here before," he indicated. After talking with the fliers on the scene, Johnson learned something of what happened. They were on a training flight, returning on a round trip from Vero to Savannah and back, when they developed engine'trouble at about 8,000 feet. They radioed Miami Control, which was monitor- ing their flight, and asked them what to do. Miami told them the nearest airport was Sebastian. "They were probably over the In- dian River," Johnson estimated. "If there'd been no airport at Sebastian, they might have tried to land on a roadway. Two to three weeks ago an Islander landed on AIA near Fort Pierce." At 5,000 feet and three miles from the airport, Johnson continued, their Sebgstian Sun Week of February 16,1990 Ptr. 5-A �r engine quit. After that, "all things considered, he did the right thing. He attempted to lan4 pn Roseland Road. By,the time ht;.as probably about five feetoff thotd he was coming in fairly level.'m guessing his air speed just befo°etouching down was about 60 or 70riiles an hour. Thenhe bounced it down hard [on the wing landing gear] Eflt turned hard to the Tight. "The bushes saved his life." That night, did. three men spent a short time at 1,66son's house to get away from the. commotion and the press. At that lime, Johnson said, they didn't know what the engine problem was. At Pro-Flite:'Chief Flight Instruc- tor Bill Corcoran made it clear the next morning that his three students were not availWgfor comment. The Vero school owns about 30 planes, one of which is the Piper II the men were flying. Corcoran affirmed that they had sustained "absolutely no injury." The medics released them at the scene. The chief instructor reported that Nodaras, thepilot, has his private license, and is working on a commer- cial rating - he reason for the air journey to Savannah and back. The other two have their commercial li- censes and are studying at Pro-Flite to be flight instructors. They proba- bly are planning to return to Greece and work in commercial aviation there, remarked Corcoran. Investigation by the Federal Avia- tion Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board began on Thursday to determine the cause of the engine failure. Meanwhile, the residents of Sebas- tian and Roseland have a lot to think over and work out. No matter what political or economic decisions are made, if any, the psychological im- pact of the two crashes hits hard. Jessica Falzon left the site of the wreck saying, `.Now I know why this is called dead man's curve, Mom."