By Erin Alberty, Cathy McKitrick and Wendy Ogata
The Salt Lake Tribune
ROY, Utah — A West Haven man was critically injured when his plane crashed into a Roy neighborhood Sunday, setting two homes on fire and damaging a third.
Neighbors near 2000 West and 4300 South rushed outside about 6 p.m. as a ball of fire cut through the darkness.
“There was ... an orange flash — a huge orange flash,” said Jennifer Kelly, who lives across the street from the crash site. “Another second later, a blue flash.
“I ran across our front room, pulled back the curtains and could see flames shooting up through the pine trees.”
Neighbors spotted the pilot lying in the street gutter near the border between two houses, where 30- to 50-foot flames rose from the debris.
“Flesh was just hanging from his face and hands,” said Val Saunders, who was at a family birthday party about a block away when he heard the crash. “He was in a lot of pain. He had a lot of burns.”
Parts of the plane were scattered on the roadway. The plane’s door was across the street in the Kellys’ yard.
“No one pulled the pilot from the plane,” Saunders said, “because there was no plane left.”
The wreckage destroyed an electrical transformer box, which was racked by small explosions in the minutes after the crash, said neighbor Mitchell Paul. Saunders and other neighbors pulled the pilot across the street.
“There were sparks flying everywhere,” Saunders said.
The man, who appeared to be in his 40s, said he lives in West Haven and was flying his Cessna C210 6-seater home from Lake Powell, reported neighbor Marneé Bowden, who also was with the pilot after the crash.
He did not know where he was, Saunders said.
“I asked, ‘Do you remember coming into the airport?’ He said, ‘No.’” Saunders said. “I asked, ‘Do you remember talking to the tower?’ He said, ‘No.’”
Officials have not determined the cause of the crash or whether Sunday’s fog was a factor. The plane was on a landing approach northeast toward the Ogden-Hinckley Airport when it began hitting utility poles and trees near 2175 West and 4400 South. It crashed into a cluster of trees between two houses on the south side of the T-intersection of 2075 West and 4300 South, said Kelly said.
Medics took the pilot to a local hospital in an ambulance because the fog was too severe to fly him by helicopter, said Roy Fire Chief Jon Ritchie. He was later transferred to the burn unit at University Hospital with critical injuries.
While crews put out fires at the two houses, some residents were evacuated to a nearby elementary school, Ritchie said. The destroyed transformer cut power to at least 1,700 customers in the Ogden area, Rocky Mountain Power representatives said.
This is not the first plane to hit the neighborhood, two blocksfrom the airport. Five years ago, a plane crashed into the house at 2135 W. 4300 South, two doors from Sunday’s crash.
Two years before that, a plane crashed about a block away, said neighbor Randy Bowden.
Neighbors Gerald and Cathy Nichols, who live nearby, said that’s too close — and too frequent — for comfort.
“We get a little nervous,” when we go outside, Gerald Nichols said.
Randy Bowden said other routes should be looked at.
“Those planes need to take off and land out of the north,” Bowden said. “That whole end is open fields and highway. There’s no reason they need to come over all these houses.”
Sunday’s crash was about two blocks from the southwest corner of the airport and less than a mile from the end of the longest runway.
Roy Mayor Joe Ritchie said the crash record near the airport deserves some perspective. Considering the thousands of landings and takeoffs at the airport, it’s actually pretty safe, he said.
“The hazard goes with the territory and it’s not unreasonable to expect that someday there’s going to be an airplane crash. I guess we’re just really fortunate that we don’t have more crashes than we have,” he said.
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