A man piloting an Eagle Air Transport Cessna crashed in an isolated, wooded area of southwest Flagler County near Lake Disston Friday evening for unknown reasons. The pilot died. There were no passengers.
Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly, speaking from the scene after visiting the crash site and taking part in the search overnight, described an extensive debris field resulting from what appeared to be a very rapid descent and crash, lacking any glide pattern. He speculated that the crash was the result either of a medical condition with the pilot or a mechanical issue.
The plane, a 10-seat, 2012 Caravan Cessna 208, left Sebastian Airport, between Vero Beach and Melbourne on the east coast of Florida, at 5:30 p.m. It was on its way to Palatka Municipal Airport. Contact with the plane was lost at 7:30 p.m. when the plane was flying at an altitude of 900 feet. The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office was notified of the plane’s disappearance at 8 p.m.
“Just a little after midnight, we located the aircraft,” Staly said in a brief press conference about 800 feet from the site of the crash. “It was pitch dark last night. There was no moon, a lot of cloud coverage. I was here last night. It was about the worst conditions you could imagine to try to find an aircraft.” Deputies walked the area, “and noticed the smell of fuel. That allowed us to have the Volusia helicopter pointed in a smaller area, and they spotted one of the tires.”
The plane still had a lot of fuel on board. The Department of Environmental Protection will be responding and cleaning up the fuel spill.
“I’m certainly not an investigator, but it does not look like there wasn’t much of a glide path when it impacted. It was more of a almost a straight down impact,” Staly said. The agency’s crime scene investigator unit was at the scene. But the sheriff’s office’s only role beyond the search is to contain and secure the site, photograph it, and turn it over to the National Transportation Safety Board, whose investigators will take over later today. The NTSB investigates all crashes. Those investigations can take months.
Eagle Air Transport is an Ottawa, Ill.-based company that operates eight planes in support of the skydiving industry and on contracts with the Department of Defense, according to its website.
Eagle Air Transport President Rook Nelson told WFTV that the company became aware of the incident at 8 p.m. Saturday. “Around 6 pm an experienced pilot departed Sebastian, FL enroute to Palatka,” Nelson said in a statement. “The aircraft did not make it to its destination for unknown reasons. We have very little information beyond this and are working with local and federal authorities in the ongoing investigation.”
Nelson in a Facebook video on the company’s page in December described the company’s off-season maintenance projects, and pointed at the two planes that were getting ready to fly to Sebastian. “So now the big rush is getting them ready for the holidays,” Nelson says in the video. “This plane and the one over here have to be in Florida by Christmastime, so we’re going to be taking them down this coming week [the video was posted on Dec. 15] and getting them ready for the big holiday event” in Sebastian. (See an Eagle Air Transport video of skydivers here.)
The family of the pilot has not yet been notified, so his name was not released. “We had been given a phone number for who we believe was the pilot, and had no contact there either,” Staly said. “And so we extend our condolences to the loved ones and the family.”
The Sheriff’s Office expects to be at the recovery site for the next three days. Its personnel cleared a path to the crash site. The NTSB will claim the plane, much as a medical examiner claims a body, and conduct the equivalent of an autopsy on the plane to determine the cause of the crash.
“The way this plane is destroyed, it’s going to take some time,” Staly said. “These smaller aircraft do not have like a black box, so you have to look at the technology that’s on the plane, just like in your car. They can look at the computers and stuff, I’m sure that the investigators will look at all the radar projections, those kind of things. But it would really be speculation my part–I think you’re going to find it’s a medical issue, or some kind of incident involving the aircraft, technology on board.”
There was no indication of a fire or an explosion. The NTSB was delayed getting to the site only because the Daytona 500 prevented securing a flight into Daytona Beach. Federal officials are having to land in. Orlando and drive in.
Records indicate the crash is the first in Flagler County since January 2022, when a single-engine plane crash-landed on I-95, south of State Road 100, three miles from Flagler County airport. There were two people aboard. They survived with minor scratches. The pilot had lost power. The pilot maneuvered into a landing on the highway, colliding with a truck, which sent the plane into the woodline.
