By Emily Alpert
Gilroy
– The helicopter dangled the silvery fuselage like a trout, limp
at the end of a fishing line. Nearly two days after a twin-engine
plane plummeted into a sewage tank Monday afternoon, salvagers
lifted the mangled plane, piece by piece, from the drained tank,
using a squat black helicopter.
Gilroy – The helicopter dangled the silvery fuselage like a trout, limp at the end of a fishing line. Nearly two days after a twin-engine plane plummeted into a sewage tank Monday afternoon, salvagers lifted the mangled plane, piece by piece, from the drained tank, using a squat black helicopter.
“It’s an extremely complex situation,” said Kristi Dunks, an air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s taken us some time to coordinate.”
The bizarre crash claimed the lives of three Japanese nationals: flight students Yoshiyuki Kato, 27, and Yasushi Miyata, 38, and their instructor, Shoki Haraguchi, 26. The three took off from Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose at 1pm Monday, and were due back by 5pm the same day. About 4pm, a pilot reported a plane falling in Gilroy; witnesses described the plane spiraling, nose-first, toward the ground.
The slippery, foul floor of the drained tank made it impossible for coroners and investigators to dissect the crash on-site, said Dunks. Nor could the victims be removed: the three men were trapped inside the fuselage.
“We’re working with raw sewage,” Dunks said. “There’s a lot of biohazards we have to be concerned with.”
Instead, the helicopter lifted the plane’s remains to a nearby field, where a coroner worked Wednesday afternoon to extract the victims. The crumpled plane will be transported to a secure storage facility in Sacramento, where investigators will study it for clues to the crash.
Remarkably, the city’s wastewater plant is relatively undisturbed. Operations have continued as usual, and plant officials have said the tank could stay out of use for up to two weeks without affecting the facility. The only evidence of the crash, at the site, is a shattered handrail. On impact, the plane broke into pieces.
Within five business days, NTSB officials expect to release a preliminary report online, detailing the facts of the crash. But the accident’s cause could take far longer: a full investigation may take six months to a year.
The incident has drawn global media attention to Gilroy, with Japanese news anchors jostling for footage next to Univision reporters, San Francisco photographers and cameramen from Salinas.
Fatal air accidents are rare, especially in instructional settings: in 2005, only 16 such accidents occurred. But even among air accidents, Monday’s event was a strange one. Surveying the putrid tank, one NTSB official remarked, “It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Emily Alpert covers public safety issues for The Dispatch. She can be reached at 847-7158, or at
ea*****@gi************.com
.
