On Saturday, two grandparents were killed in a tiny village in Illinois after their small, twin-engine plane crashed in North Carolina. According to reports, Joseph and Patty Kreher took off from Cahokia’s St. Louis Downtown Airport and flew to London, Kentucky, before continuing on to Winston-Salem. They were on their way to see relatives for Thanksgiving when Joe’s twin-engine Piper PA-30 crashed near the airport. The family confirmed that the duo had previously traveled from St. Louis to North Carolina successfully.
The fatalities were verified on Saturday night by the Winston-Salem Police Department when a medical examiner from Forsyth County arrived at the site just after 3 p.m. The jet arrived in London and circled the airport an hour and 45 minutes after departure. The flight was rescheduled to arrive at Smith Reynolds at 11:10 a.m.
The National Transportation Safety Board cleaned the wreckage Monday morning, and the area was cordoned off. Before dragging the jet away with a pickup truck, crew workers chopped it apart using saws. A neighboring homeowner, Susan Harrison-Bailey, told reporters that she was close to the disaster when it happened and that the crippled aircraft came to rest between her and her neighbor’s houses. She stated she had no idea it was an aircraft. There was a lot of smoke. It had obviously been crushed into the trees. It landed in a straight upward and downward motion.
According to North Carolina State Highway Patrol Sergeant C.G. Byrd, the plane crashed near the woodline of a residential neighborhood. Luckily, no one else in the neighborhood has reported any more injuries. The pilot allegedly alerted the control tower before the crash that their engine was not producing as much power as the other one.
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board will work for the next six months to discover the cause of the disaster. They run a 100-hour inspection to make sure the spark plugs, the gasoline, everything is there, Wentz stated. Friends and relatives will grieve Krehers’ death during the inquiry. It’s a shame that this occurred so close to Thanksgiving, Speiser said, adding that their thoughts and prayers are with this family. Joseph Kreher is a licensed single and multi-engine aviation instructor, according to the National Association of Flight Instructors.
The tragedy comes less than a month after a tiny plane collided with a house in Minnesota, killing 3 individuals. A Cessna 172 crashed with the second storey of a Hermantown home before landing in the occupants’ backyard. The two people were uninjured. Tyler Fretland, 32, of Burnsville, as well as the plane’s pilot, Alyssa Schmidt, 32, of St. Paul, and her brother, Matthew Schmidt, 31, of Burnsville, died in the disaster.
