Plane crash in Milwaukee

[Gregg]

You might have caught this on the national news if you watched. It happened at about 4PM. A Cessna(?) went down into Lake Michigan about a mile off shore. There were two pilots, and a medical team of 4 on board returning to Ann Arbor with organs being donated to a patient who was already in surgery.

No one survived the crash. I heard yesterday that the patient got the organs from elsewhere, but the first surgery was halted, of course. Very tragic loss.

I was of course downtown working at the time of the crash. Yesterday I heard a pilot being interviewed who said he considers the two deceased pilots to be heros. The interviewee stated his belief that they intentionally directed the plane over toward the Lake to avoid coming down into a building or onto a busy street.

There was a trim failure, which I believe is part of the tail end though not the "rudder"; perhaps on the smaller horizontal "wings" on either side. The pilot turned the plane, and it went down, hitting the lake at over 200 mph. It could have been so much worse if they had crashed downtown, or even in the marina.

[jcarter]

Similar thing happened twice in my family, my uncle was working for United Fruit Company when their little plane went down in the jungle in Central America, they were unhurt, and managed to follow a river to a tiny town and got out.
Then more recently one of our family was going back to Martha's Vinyard airport, when the cable to one of the rudder controls let go, and down he went. Very lucky to put down on the water and not on the land. Fishing boat picked him up.
Jane

[Gregg]

This one apparently dropped almost straight down after the pilot tried to execute a turn out over the lake. They must have gone in nose first. It's now only five days later, so they haven't assessed the crash site sufficiently enough to decide on an approach for bringing the wreckage up to the surface. They've located the orange "black" box, but nothing from that has been released to the media as yet.

The story is in the current U.S. News - very briefly. It says the crash took place just off shore at the airport. Well, ok, aeronautically, that's not very far. It would be most accurate to say just off the marina located downtown, north of the airport. I expect we will be getting more "human interest" stories soon from our media about those who died, even though they were from Michigan, not here.