NY - 3 Survive Plane Crash

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3 Survive Crash

Training flight had just taken off from Republic

By Barbara Durkin Staff Writer

Mervin Patrick had dreamed since boyhood of being a pilot, and yesterday, with his mother and a flight instructor aboard, he took off on his first training flight from Republic Airport in East Farmingdale.

But moments later, at around 8:45 a.m., the single-engine four-seater Piper Cherokee Warrior crashed, clipping a utility pole and barbed-wire fence before landing in an icy sump adjacent to the airport and a major shopping center and Multiplex Cinemas along Route 110.

Patrick, 19, his mother, Joyce Reynolds, 44, both of Queens, and the flight instructor, Carlos Leon of Elmont, were taken to Nassau County Medical Center, where they were all in the intensive-care unit in critical but stable condition last evening.

Leon, the 21-year-old instructor from Flightways of Long Island training school near the airport, was piloting the plane. A witness reported seeing the propeller stop and the aircraft stall at about 150 feet in the air, said Arnold Roholt, a Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector in Farmingdale.

The National Transportation Safety Board will take over the investigation of the crash tomorrow, Roholt said. NTSB officials did not return calls for comment.

Jim Stiner, 27, was working in the gardening department of Home Depot in the Airport Plaza shopping center when the plane came tumbling out of the sky.

"I heard a noise just like a loud crash, like a car crash," said Stiner, of Islandia. "I saw a tumbling white spiraling object."

Once he realized a plane had crashed, Stiner ran out and scaled the 8-foot gate around the sump. He found the twisted wreckage of the plane at the bottom of a large triangular ditch opposite the store's parking lot.

Leon, the instructor, was lying on the ground next to the plane. The two passengers were still inside.

"They were asking what happened," said Stiner, who put his jacket over the trembling Patrick, who was sitting in the right front passenger seat. "I was trying to keep them from moving. There was blood all over the place."

The front seat had been twisted back, trapping Reynolds in back, said Stiner, who said he reached into the aircraft and turned off the fuel tank and the ignition.

The instructor did not look as badly injured, Stiner said. "He asked me, 'How are my students?'"

As anxious family members waited at the East Meadow hospital, Leon's stepfather, Steven Curtiss, said Leon had been staying with him and Leon's mother, Mariana Curtiss, in their Elmont home since he completed flight instructor school last summer.

The FAA's Roholt declined to give Leon's flying hours, but described him as "relatively experienced."

Jeanette Baumbach, a spokeswoman for the North American Institute of Aviation in Conway, S.C., where Leon received his instructor's license after completing a six-month program, agreed that he "had a reputation as a good pilot."

Steven Curtiss said his stepson wanted to be a commercial pilot. "They're still investigating and I'm curious to know if it was pilot error or mechanical error. I had heard there was a faulty propeller, but they haven't told us much."

Janet Smith, who is a cousin to Patrick and niece to Reynolds, said she was at the airport yesterday morning to watch their flight.

"He was going out for his first flying program this morning," Smith said, adding that Patrick wanted to bring his mother along for the experience. "He's wanted to fly since he was a little boy."

Reynolds' sister, Carmen Smith, said that Patrick -- who with his family moved to Cambria Heights, Queens, from Jamaica, West Indies, last year -- attends the College of Aeronautics at LaGuardia Airport.

"He said if only he could learn to fly, he would fly us all to Jamaica," said Carmen Smith, who added that Patrick is alert and awake. His mother, a child-care worker in Queens, was described as having head injuries. Officials yesterday described the flight as a "demonstration flight" in which an instructor takes up a prospective pilot to help them decide if they want to pursue getting a license.

The Piper Warrior contains dual controls that would allow the instructor and a student in the other front seat to fly the plane, airport manager Stephen Williams said. But Leon was the pilot in command yesterday, officials said, and always would have ultimate control over the plane's operation.

Janet Smith said she watched the early morning takeoff and then saw a plane tumble through the air. At first, she said, she wasn't sure that it was the one bearing her relatives. "Then I saw people running, and I went to them and asked and they told me that was the flight they were on," she said.

A chunk of the plane's right wing was sheared off before the mangled plane was partially submerged in the sump, near the shopping center that houses the Farmingdale Multiplex Cinemas. The plane was "pretty well disintegrated" when the East Farmingdale Fire Department responded to the call, said East Farmingdale Fire Chief James Napolitano, who added that the tail had "snapped off" before the hull crashed into the icy sump. "It was very difficult to get to, everyone was slipping. The crash truck couldn't get down there."

One firefighter suffered a broken ankle after wading into the area. Roholt, of the FAA, declined to comment on the airplane's maintenance history. FAA records list the owner as Aircraft Leasing Inc. in Cold Spring Harbor.

Arthur Volk, who lives at the Cold Spring Harbor address listed as the plane's owner, said yesterday he no longer owns the plane. He said he sold it and it is operated by Flightways, the airport flight school.

Flightways employees yesterday refused to comment and referred all questions to Million Air, a plane maintenance company housed next door that they said works with them on a day-to-day basis. Glen Gross, general manager of Million Air, said he would not comment on the specifics of the crash, because NTSB and FAA officials had told him not to disclose any information, but he defended Flightways' record. He also refused to reveal the business relationship between Million Air and Flightways, though airport manager Stephen Williams said they are part of the same corporate entity.

"We are 100 percent compliant with the FAA regulations of a flight school, and that's as much as I'm going to say," Gross said.

Carmen Smith said yesterday that her sister had called her at 6:30 a.m. to tell her she was going to the airport with her son.

"I wish I would have known that she was going to go up," she said. "I would have tried to talk her out of it."

http://www.newsday.com/news/news.htm



-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 19, 2000


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