A skydiving plane that crashed in Hawaii, killing 11 people, was involved in scary midair incident three years ago in Northern California that prompted the 14 skydivers aboard to jump earlier than planned to safety, according to government investigative records.
The Beechcraft King Air plane crashed and burned on Oahu island’s north shore Friday evening after witnesses said it appeared to turn back shortly after takeoff. In the 2016 incident near Byron, California, the twin-engine plane stalled three times and spun repeatedly before the pilot at that time managed to land it safely, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its investigative report.
No one aboard survived the Hawaii crash, which left a small pile of smoky wreckage near the chain link fence surrounding Dillingham Airfield, a one-runway seaside airfield.
The plane turned around and appeared to be heading back to the airfield after when it “flipped a reverse,” skimmed some trees and crashed near the airfield’s perimeter fence, witness Steven Tickemeyer told KHON television news. Other witnesses reported seeing the plane wobble before it went down.
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“We showed up a couple minutes after, and the whole plane was engulfed in flames,” said Tickemeyer, who did not explain in greater detail how the plane flipped.
The crash appeared to be the worst U.S. civil aviation accident since a 2011 accident at the Reno Air Show in Nevada that killed the pilot and 10 spectators.
Officials in Hawaii initially reported that nine people had died and that three of them were customers of the skydiving company operating the plane and that six were employees. But the Hawaii Department of Transportation tweeted Saturday that officials later “confirmed there were 11 people on board the plane” and no survivors. They were not identified.
The flight was operated by the Oahu Parachute Center skydiving company. The ratio of employees to customers aboard suggested that tandem jumps may have been planned in which the customers would have jumped while attached to experienced skydivers, Tim Sakahara, a spokesman for the Hawaii Department of Transportation, told reporters.
Some family members of those aboard were at the airport when the plane went down at about 6:30 p.m., said Honolulu Police Chief Manuel Neves.
Witness Wylie Schoonover saw the plane flying over the rim of some trees while driving from a nearby YMCA camp after picking up a friend. Then she saw smoke billowing from the airfield and drove over.
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There was an “insane amount of fire,” she said.
“It didn’t even look like a plane. A bunch of people were asking ‘what is this?’ It was completely gone,” said Schoonover.
Two Federal Aviation Administration inspectors went to the crash site Friday, and National Transportation Safety Board investigators were expected to arrive Saturday evening, said safety board spokesman Eric Weiss.
The plane with two turboprop engines was manufactured in 1967, FAA records said.
An NTSB report into the July 23, 2016, Northern California incident blamed pilot error and said that the plane rotated nine times during one of the three spins it experienced.
Investigators found that the plane had lost a piece of horizontal stabilizer and that the plane’s elevator had broken off. The plane was also too heavily weighted toward the back, which was also blamed on the pilot.
No one answered the phone at Oahu Parachute Center, which advertises its services on a website saying its jumps offer people “a magical experience.” Tandem jumps are featured at prices ranging from $170 to $250.
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Videos from the company’s Facebook page show jumps from the same plane that crashed, with customers strapped to employee skydivers jumping out the side door of the aircraft from 3,000 metres or higher, with the Pacific Ocean and the Oahu’s green mountains far below.
Dillingham Airfield is used mostly for skydiving and glider flights. Hawaii shares the airfield with the Army, which uses it for helicopter night-vision training.