Pilot Killed After Small Plane Crashes In Danbury
DANBURY, CT (AP / CBSNewYork) - A small airplane clipped a house and crashed in Danbury on Sunday evening, killing the pilot, officials said.
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Peter Woodsmall, 64, of Mission Hills, Kan., was killed after his plane went down while he was preparing to land.
Mayor Mark Boughton said in a Twitter posting that the plane crashed in a yard next to the kitchen window of a 91-year-old woman.
The woman, Jenny Valeri, who was not hurt, was going over her checkbook when the crash happened.
"She's hard of hearing, but she could hear it, she said, literally, she jumped, it moved her, you know, the sonic thing of it all," Paul Valeri, the woman's son, told CBS 2.
Valeri says the plane clipped a light beacon at the Danbury Airport, causing it to lose a wing.
"You could not have placed it with a crane more perfectly the way it's just fit right there up against the house. Finished there, literally within inches [of the kitchen]. Just awful," he told WCBS 880 Connecticut Bureau Chief Fran Schneidau.
Valeri told Schneidau that it appears the plane had run out of fuel as it did not burst into flames after crashing. He says a fuel-fed fire would have taken the house and his mother.
"It was such a close call," Valeri said.
The single-engine, propeller-driven plane -- a Cirrus SR-22 -- went down shortly after 8 p.m. after losing contact with the tower at Danbury Municipal Airport, Federal Aviation Authority spokesman Jim Peters told The Courant.
The plane glanced off a house and knocked off a gutter, Danbury Fire Capt. Bernie Meehan told the Hartford Courant.
It was the second plane crash near Danbury Municipal Airport in less than a month.
On Oct. 1, another small plane crashed shortly after takeoff from the Danbury airport, landing about a mile away on a lawn in Ridgefield after clipping the tops of several trees. The pilot was treated for non-life threatening injuries.
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