Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board were at the scene of a small plane crash just off the North Perry Airport property Tuesday, collecting what was left of the aircraft after Monday's tragedy that took three lives.
The team from the NTSB brought in a crane to take away the larger parts of the Beechcraft Bonanza that crashed just short of the airport. The largest pieces remaining were taken away on a flatbed truck.
Ring camera video showed the tragedy in its final seconds, the street in flames after the plane struck an SUV as it came down. Megan Bishop was driving the SUV with her son Taylor inside.
Taylor, along with the two people in the plane, were killed in the crash.
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Steve Geller, the Broward County Mayor, said he felt the pain of the tragedy.
“Anytime anybody dies it's a tragedy,” Geller said Tuesday.
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Geller said when compared to other similar airports across much of the state, North Perry doesn’t have more crashes. He said data shows over the last year there were 280,000 take-offs and landings at North Perry, making it one of the busiest general aviation airports in Florida.
"When you compare them to the amount of accidents per take-off and landing at every other general aviation airport in South Florida as far north as Port St. Lucie and as far west as Naples, North Perry is exactly in the middle, exactly average," Geller said.
Over the last year, there have been multiple crashes involving planes from North Perry. On May 12th, a student pilot was killed and his instructor hospitalized after a crash in Miramar. In August, a plane went down in Pembroke Park. In November, a pilot died in a runway crash. In December, there was a crash on takeoff, and later that month a plane went down and one person eventually died later that month.
“An airport like this is largely for training," Federal Aviation Administration flight instructor Jay Rollins said.
Rollins is a former Navy aviation and captain with American Airlines. He said there’s a big difference between the multi-engine commercial and private jets at bigger airports and single-engine light aircraft flying from North Perry.
"It’s for smaller aircraft or aircraft that have one engine in particular and because of that the takeoff is particularly critical or going over water because you have no backup. If that engine quits you’ve got to land immediately,” Rollins said.
That’s what NBC 6 was told happened Monday when the pilot took off to the east, lost power, and made a right turn to get back to the southeast corner of the airport property but came up about 50 feet short.
Geller said he’s directed the aviation department to look into the flight schools here, and other operations, but it's the FAA that is the one who technically those flying out of North Perry have to answer to when it comes to their credentials and flight qualifications.
