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One Dead in Plane Crash Near Farm Show in Central Iowa
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - The pilot of a small plane towing an advertising banner died Thursday morning when the plane crashed into a corn field near the Farm Progress Show in central Iowa, officials said.
The crash happened minutes after the plane took off from the nearby Boone airport, Boone County Sheriff Ron Fehr said. He said witnesses told him "the plane was having problems getting enough altitude with the banner and that the banner was flipping while he was flying." The pilot, who was from Ohio, was the only one on the plane, which also was registered in Ohio, Fehr said. The pilot's name was not immediately released pending notification of family. The plane crashed about 1½ miles away from the Farm Progress Show, a three-day expo that draws thousands of farmers and hundreds of exhibitors each year. The show's final day was Thursday. No one on the ground was injured, Fehr said. Fehr said he didn't know the dimensions of the banner, but it ended up several hundred feet north of the crash site. "There's some kind of a safety lever or something on the plane where you can ditch the banner and that's what it looked like he was trying to do," the sheriff said. He said several planes were towing banners during the Farm Show, but he did not know if the plane and pilot involved in the crash had done so earlier. The plane, a Cessna 150, was registered to Drake Aerial Enterprise in Genoa, Ohio, said Elizabeth Isham Cory, spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration. There is no telephone listing for the company. Air America Aerial Ads, of Genoa, is also listed on the FAA Registry. A man who answered the phone at the business declined to comment. Isham Cory said the investigation was just beginning and it was too early to say whether the banner was a factor in the crash. "That's real preliminary and we don't know yet," she said. The Boone News-Republican, which had a reporter on the scene, said officials used a tractor to plow through the corn to reach the crash site. A witness, Shane Banghart, who lives near the crash site, told the newspaper he saw the plane flying over his house. It went out of sight and he heard a loud bang, he said. Another witness, Bob Johnson, told KCCI-TV the banner got caught in the corn and the plane dove into the ground. More Good Stuff |
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