OCEAN CITY — The crew on an Ocean City sportfishing boat was the first on the scene last Saturday when a small private aircraft crashed into the ocean after flying across the Eastern Shore from the Washington D.C. area with an unconscious pilot and an F-16 fighter jet escort.
Shortly after 3 p.m. last Saturday, a private single-engine Cirrus SR22 crashed into the Atlantic just over 50 miles due east of Wachapreague, Va. in the Washington Canyon just south of Ocean City.
The private plane, piloted by Ronald Hutchinson, 67, was on a flight plan from Waukesha, Wis. to Manassas, Va. last Saturday when it flew into restricted air space over Washington at about 13,000 feet.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the single-engine plane had not been responding to radio calls since about 1 p.m. Under the protocol for an unresponsive plane flying in restricted airspace, two U.S. NORAD F-16 aircraft were sent up and came along the Cirrus to investigate and observed the pilot to be unconscious in the cockpit. Hutchinson was the only occupant of the plane.
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Possibly deceased before crashing?
ReplyDeleteHard to believe they scrambled planes for this event. During 911 it took over an hour to scramble planes
ReplyDelete10:32
ReplyDeleteIt appears that way or at least unconscious.
The pilots condition could have been a result of anything from a heart attack to CO poisoning.
With auto-pilot engaged and nothing to disengage, it will fly on until engine fuel starvation.
A very sad occurrence.