LAKE CITY, Fla. – The National Transportation Safety Board has released its final report on a deadly plane crash in January 2020 near Lake City.
The crash happened Jan. 25, 2020, less than a half-mile north of the Cannon Creek Airpark, a neighborhood with a landing strip for pilots living in or visiting the community, which is where the NTSB said the plane had taken off from.
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Several days before the crash, according to the report, the pilot was on approach to the runway when the engine “cut out,” but she was able to land safely. The report said the engine was serviced and was working normally. On the day of the crash, the plane went into a house at a near-vertical angle, killing the pilot, according to the report.
The report shows a witness told NTSB he saw the plane turn “hard left” after takeoff and then heard the crash.
“The witness’s description that the airplane was in a ‘hard left’ turn, the location of the accident site relatively close to the runway, the lack of a discernable horizontal wreckage path, and little fragmentation of the wreckage to suggest a high-energy impact, were consistent with the airplane impacting the ground in a near-vertical descent at a relatively low speed. Thus, it is likely that the pilot exceeded the airplane’s critical angle of attack during the steep, low-altitude turn shortly after takeoff, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall and loss of airplane control at an altitude too low for recovery,” the report states.
The report lists the probable cause as “the pilot’s exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall and subsequent loss of control at low altitude.”