Originally Posted by
TowerDog
Private Pilot attempting take off in fog.
5 killed including his 2 daughters.
Sad and so preventable..
I agree. As Sheriff Grady Judd said in one of the media conferences, if he knew his friend was going to try to fly in that thick fog, he would have tackled him to keep him away from the plane.
The fog was so thick that it took first responders about 30 minutes to locate the crash after arriving at the airport from radio scanner traffic archived online. There were the usual conflicting initial reports, e.g. a plane was on fire and the pilot was trying to put it out.
Shortly after taking off in dense fog near Tampa, the pilot, John H. Shannon, 70, and four others — including two of his daughters — were killed in a crash, the authorities said. The twin-engine plane burst into flames after going down at Bartow Municipal Airport in Polk County, Fla.
The Cessna aircraft took off despite thick fog that had settled over the airport shortly before sunrise and had limited visibility to less than one-fifth of a mile.
“No one should have attempted to take off in a small plane in that weather,” Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, said at a news conference on Sunday.
An airport employee who was filming the fog on a cellphone recorded the sounds of the plane taking off and crashing, Sheriff Judd said. The fog was so thick that the plane could not be seen in the video, he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/25/u...ane-crash.html