Officials provide more details into fatal Ferrisburgh plane crash

VERGENNES — Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board provided more details into the private plane crash that killed four Connecticut residents near Basin Harbor airstrip on Sunday.

Kurt Gibson, an aviation accident investigator for the board, said he arrived on the scene Tuesday morning and accounted for all major parts of the aircraft.

“The wreckage will be recovered later on today and sent to a salvage facility, where we can examine it at a later date,” Gibson told reporters in a field near the airstrip on Tuesday afternoon.

So far, investigators know the aircraft, a four-person Piper PA-28R-180 called the Piper Arrow, departed from Windham Airport in Connecticut on Sunday morning. The group landed at Basin Harbor Airport in Ferrisburgh for a lunch reservation and later departed the airstrip around 12:25 p.m.

When the plane did not return to Connecticut as expected, relatives of the group contacted Connecticut State Police. The crash site was located by Vermont state and local police around 12:20 a.m. Monday.

Vermont State Police identified the four victims as Paul Pelletier, 55, of Columbia, Connecticut; Frank Rodriquez, 88, of Lebanon, Connecticut; Susan Van Ness, 51, of Middletown, Connecticut; and Delilah Van Ness, 15, of Middletown, Connecticut.

Gibson did not identify who was flying the plane when it crashed.

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Investigators, he said, will examine the plane for mechanical malfunctions, complete a 72-hour history of the pilot and look into environmental factors, including the weather and runway conditions.

“We’re very preliminary into this,” Gibson said. “But the Piper Arrow has been manufactured since the 1960s and 70s, and it’s a very safe aircraft. There have been what are called airworthiness directives on Arrows, but we will be going through it to make sure the maintenance has been compliant with all those airworthiness directives.”

The Piper Arrow does not have a black box, Gibson added, but any data investigators recover will be sent to the National Transportation Safety Board lab.

Basin Harbor Airport is a private, uncontrolled airport, so it doesn’t have air traffic control or a control tower, Gibson said.

“All the pilots just kinda have to go radio communications and tell everybody where they’re at and what their intentions are,” he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board will complete a joint investigation with the Federal Aviation Administration. A preliminary report with information about the crash will be released within 30 days, and a final report identifying a probable cause will be released within 18-24 months, Gibson said.

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