I just found out an old high school and college mate died earlier this month. I wish I had known him better. We had mutual friends, but never spoke to one another, passed by each other on campus and never said "hi". I didn't know him very well, but I was really shocked by it because he was so young - he was our age. It made me realize the fragility of life.
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Midair plane crash kills two young pilots
06:04 PM PDT on Friday, August 5, 2005
KING5.com and Wire Reports
RENTON, Wash. – National Transportation Safety Board investigators are reviewing radio traffic between the Renton airport tower and two planes that collided near Interstate 405 Thursday evening, killing two young Boeing workers.
One plane landed safely at a Renton airport, but the other crashed through the roof of a building on the Kennydale Elementary school campus.
The collision occurred at about 5:45 p.m. The Cessna 152, smashed through the roof of Kennydale Elementary School, an empty two-story building that was closed for remodeling after the end of the school year in June. Both men on board died. The plane completely pierced the roof of the school and came to rest inside the building.
The first aircraft, a float plane, made an emergency landing beside a runway at nearby Renton Municipal Airport. All five people aboard scooted to safety after the deHavilland Beaver DHC-2 skipped across the grass for about 150 yards, bounced two or three times and skidded to a halt.
Pilots in their 20's
The flight instructor, Kevin Dukes, 26, was a skilled pilot and a bright and talented Boeing engineer. He was teaching a young Boeing coworker, Jack Ho, who had just bought into the Subsonics Flight Club. He had been flying for four or five years and wanted to become a commercial pilot.
Ho, who was piloting the plane had logged just four or five prior flights.
"They both worked for Boeing as flight test engineers, they were both bright, young men," said Bob Howard, the president of the Subsonics Flight Club, which owns the Cessna.
He was trying to piece together what went wrong.
"I've landed in the pattern hundreds of time…” he added. “It's see and avoid, you're in contact with the Renton tower…and until they know what happened there, it's hard to determine why they didn't see each other."
The pilot of the other plane Fred Bahr, was credited with doing an excellent job bringing in the crippled seaplane.
"I've been flying for 45 years, it was a bad dream,” he said. “I just stopped and held everything to see if the plane was still going to fly. I didn't know where we got hit or who hit who or anything."
Both pilots were talking with the Renton Airport control tower. But the air traffic area can get congested, and the Cessna was flying west, directly into the sun at the time of the crash.
Sudden crash
"We didn't see him coming," said Lee McEachran, a passenger on the float plane. "All we saw was a red and white Cessna pass underneath us and wipe out the floats."
Fred Bahr, the pilot of the float plane, told KING 5 News that there was little warning before the collision.
"All of a sudden I just saw a red and white flash just go under us, and that's all I saw," he said. "Just a momentary flash of red and white."
The impact "literally just relocated the floats to the right.
They were at about a 30-degree angle," he added. "It's kind of strange when you look outside there to see a float and you don't see one."
"I saw the seaplane flying and a little plane come up and kind of clip it," said witness Jim Blundred. "It came straight down like a World War II plane being shot down, and it went straight down, smoke flying out of the end."
Environmental concerns
Friday morning federal crash investigators donned protective suits to head inside in the school because of asbestos, which was why the building was being torn down. With the Cessna 152 aircraft crashing through the roof, it made it an even more difficult investigation site by kicking up all that dangerous material inside.
Asbestos Abatement supervisor Tim Leftwhich said there was no danger of asbestos exposure to the neighborhood. At the school, the asbestos was covered with poly and contained enough for the investigation to continue
There were also concerns about spilled fuel and the possibility parts of the school's roof and walls might cave in.
On Thursday, daily construction crews at the school left about a half an hour before the crash.
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