The pilot of a plane that crashed near a Houston airport halted a third attempt to land just before it plummeted to the ground, killing all three inside, the National Transportation Safety Board has said.
It's unclear whether the pilot made a distress call just before the crash that happened shortly after 1 pm on Thursday near Hobby Airport, NTSB investigator Tom Latson yesterday said, and that initial information indicates the female pilot didn't make any other calls to air traffic controllers after she waved off the third landing attempt. He described the crash as a "violent impact."
"During this (third) approach, the pilot decided they would make a go-around themselves without direction and announced they were going around and began climbing out to the north," he said, adding that pilots are allowed to wave off an approach if they are not comfortable with it.
Audio posted on the website liveatc.Net showed that the female pilot was told at least twice to turn around and make another attempt to land. She was also told that she was she's flying too high and has to turn around to land at Hobby Airport.
About 12 minutes before the crash, the pilot is told to turn back around to make another landing attempt by an air traffic controller. "I'm so sorry for the confusion," the pilot responds.
After a second unsuccessful attempt to land about five minutes later, the pilot is told her plane is too high and she'll have to try a third landing attempt.
"We'll come back around and we got it this time," an air traffic controller said. A few minutes later, the pilot can be heard nervously laughing as she said, "Trying to get down again." An air traffic controller says "no problem." Just before the crash, a traffic controller says: "Ma'am, ma'am, straighten up, straighten up."
Alex Rios, 17, was inside the muffler shop that his father owns across the street when he heard a very loud sputtering noise fly over before the crash.
"We saw people inside (the plane). There was no movement," he said. Records in the Federal Aviation Administration registry show the plane was registered to Safe Aviation LLC in Moore, Oklahoma, and had been manufactured in 2012. Officials with Safe Aviation could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday, and a phone listing for the company could not be found.
