911 calls from Maryland plane crash. First caller is puzzled by plane’s parachute. Learn more about the plane and the crash in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
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Watch story from 9NEWS NOW’s Scott Broom
The first caller to 911 on Sunday couldn’t quite understand the relationship between the parachute and the plane that had just crashed near her home. Who can blame her? How many of us have seen a plane deploy an emergency chute and float somewhat gently to earth? Probably not many. There have only been 17 deployments during in-flight emergencies.
9NEWS NOW reporter Scott Broom took a closer look at the Cirrus G-3 and the crash on takeoff from Montgomery Airpark in Gaithersburg, Maryland:
A distracted pilot was to blame for a single engine plane crash in Montgomery County on Sunday, March 15, according to a charter flight operator who spoke to the pilots minutes after witnessing the incident. The witness credits the plane’s unique parachute system for saving the pilot’s life.
“He experienced a distraction in the aircraft that caused him to look away,” said Michael Klein the CEO of Open Air. “If you look away for an instant in in conditions like we had yesterday its easy to become disoriented.”
Open Air is a company that trains pilots and charters the same type of aircraft that crashed.
“There was nothing wrong with the aircraft,” Klein said the pilot told him.
Klein said he spoke to the pilot only minutes after he deployed a rocket-propelled emergency parachute which brought the nearly new Cirrus G-3 plane to a crash landing onto a street in the Flower Hill subdivision about a half-mile from the Montgomery Airpark’s runway in Gaithersburg.
Conditions at the time were overcast and hazy, which can cause disorientation and vertigo.
The identity of the pilot has not been released by authorities. He is a man in his mid-50’s who was headed to Kalamazoo, Michigan according to Montgomery County fire and rescue spokesman Pete Piringer.
The incident is the first in the region where the parachute system on a Cirrus has been deployed for an emergency landing. It has focused new attention on the single-engine Cirrus planes, which are made in Duluth, Minnesota. The Cirrus is the only parachute-equipped plane manufactured in the US.
“Its a last resort pilots don’t have in other aircraft,” said Chris Dancy of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
Dancy said including Sunday’s incident in Montgomery County, there have been 17 deployments of parachutes on Cirrus planes and 34 lives saved.
The company began selling parachute equipped planes in 1998.
