A pilot in his 20s is dead after the plane he was flying crashed late Monday morning just outside of Westerly State Airport.
Initial reports indicate the plane was coming in for a landing when the crash occurred. “The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate,” the FAA said in a statement. “The NTSB will lead the investigation and provide any updates.”
The pilot’s identity had not been released as of 6 p.m. Monday. Details such as the plane’s origin and destination, or if it was experiencing an emergency, were not available. Skies were clear and calm at the time of the incident.
“The operator of the plane did succumb to injuries as a result of the crash,” Westerly Police Department Capt. Ailton Medina said.
Local police, fire and ambulance personnel responded shortly after noon Monday to Airport Road. There, they found the wreckage of the white, single engine Cessna 172 propeller plane at the wooded edge of an open field on the side of the road opposite from the airport property. The plane was on part of the field farthest from the road, between the Westerly Crossings development and the entrance road to the airport and the town’s police station.
Parts of the plane, such as its wings, propeller and tail, were hardly recognizable from the road. Part of the wreckage was in trees and alongside what appeared to be a stone wall or boundary. The plane did not catch fire as a result of the crash.
Police, including R.I. State Troopers, closed part of Airport Road between Westerly Crossings and Tom Harvey Road for about an hour during the response.
Investigators from the FAA and officials from the R.I. Airport Corporation and R.I. Department of Environmental Management were at the crash site for much of Monday afternoon. A full investigation could take a year or more, and will be conducted by the the NTSB.
Police and investigators congregated in an area around the wreckage that was roped off with yellow tape. A tractor initially in the field was moved away, and police later brought in a four-wheeler and trucks from an access trail on the far side of the field.
The plane went down on land outside of the airport’s property, and the airfield was not shut down. Several planes took off and landed in the hours after the incident, and at least two helicopters circled the airport immediately following it.
Town Manager Shawn Lacey said police would remain on the scene overnight Monday, and that efforts to remove the wreck from the field would begin Tuesday.
“The FAA will release it for removal,” Lacey said.
According to the NTSB’s online database, the most recent prior fatal plane accident in Westerly was on Nov. 16, 2003. That involved a collision of a Cessna 180 and a Piper PA-28-181.
In that case, a young pilot’s decision to continue his landing approach with another plane on the runway was pegged as the “probable cause” of a mid-air crash that claimed the lives of two local men at Westerly State Airport, the NTSB found.
But errors on the part of both pilots – and the presence of trees that posed “runway obstructions” – all contributed to the crash, according to the board’s 2005 final report that concluded a 16-month investigation into the accident.
Fatal accidents also occurred in 1999, 1992, 1978 and 1965 in Westerly, according to the NTSB.
In March of 2003, two men were injured when the small plane that they were flying in crashed off Route 1 near the airport. The crash occurred about 1,000 feet from the airport runway, as the single-engine aircraft plowed into a tree on property of the chamber of commerce on Post Road. The men were treated for minor injuries and released from The Westerly Hospital.