No Rescue Effort For Hours

What if you had a tragic accident and nobody came? That's what apparently happened in Venice (FL) over the weekend, in the crash of a Cessna 150 near the municipal airport.

When 32-year old Larry Bradshaw and 57-year old Miguel Hernandez went down Saturday night, Cindy Toepfer and her husband, Sheldon, heard it. She called 911. But no emergency crews responded until the crash was spotted by the Civil Air Patrol the next afternoon. The bodies weren't recovered until 19 hours after the crash.

Bradshaw and Hernandez were reportedly practicing touch-and-goes when the Toepfers heard them nearby at around 7:00 pm. "I've lived under airplanes for 20 years and know how they sound," Cindy told the Venice Gondolier-Sun. "I know how they sound. We looked up because this one was sputtering. That's what made us look up. It sounded like it was out of gas."

The Toepfers live less then a mile south of the crash site. They say they saw the 150 as flew south, then banked toward the west. "Then it disappeared in the trees.... Then I heard -- or I don't know whether I felt it or heard it -- the impact."

The Toepfers looked at each other. "I said, 'Sheldon, I think that plane just crashed.' He went, 'Really, yeah, it didn't sound right.' I think when he banked he was trying to get back to the airport."

So the Toepfers went inside and Cindy called 911. She told the operator she thought she had just seen a plane crash.  The 911 operator gave her a toll free number and ended the call. Cindy dialed the 800 number and got a recording.

"I called that and they said something like it wasn't a working number, so I called 911 right back and they put me on hold. They came back and said they would tell their pilot and call the tower, whatever that means."

The toll free number given to Cindy Toepfer by the 911 operator would have been (800) 553-9072, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. That's the number for the domestic air interdiction Coordination Center in Riverside (CA). But an operator at that number said the normal way to report a crash was to do just what Cindy did in the first place -- dial 911 and report it to the local authorities.

So who did the Sheriff's Office notify? There's no tower at the Venice Municipal Airport. Instead, a spokesman says the operator called the control tower... at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport.

Efforts to find the aircraft didn't actually start until one of the pilots' relatives reported it missing at 12:30 am Sunday. A Venice police car was dispatched to the local airport at about 1:20 am, according to police logs. But that appears to have been the extent of search efforts until shortly after noon on Sunday, when the police department asked the Coast Guard to look for wreckage off the Florida Gulf Coast.

The 150 was found by Civil Air Patrol search teams in a heavily wooded part of Caspersen Beach Park in South Venice. The vegetation was so dense that recovery teams had to cut a road into the underbrush so they could get a flatbed truck to the site.

What went wrong? "We're trying to put time lines together at this point. There's a lot of open-ended questions and we've got to put them together and come up with a solution," said Venice Police Sgt. Mike Treanor.

Neither the Venice Police Department nor the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office recorded any 911 calls about a plane down near the Venice Airport Saturday night.

Bradshaw was described as a "by-the-book" flight instructor. His student, Hernandez, was a corrections officer working toward his IFR ticket.

"He told me that if he ever died, he wanted to die in a plane," Heidi Bradshaw, the instructor's wife, told a television reporter in an interview Monday. "That was his passion."

The bodies of both men are being examined and tested to see whether they survived the impact and, if so, for how long.

FAA Preliminary Accident Report

IDENTIFICATION
  Regis#: 63159        Make/Model: C150      Description: 150, A150, Commuter, Aerobat
  Date: 01/18/2004     Time: 2200

  Event Type: Accident   Highest Injury: Fatal     Mid Air: N    Missing: N
  Damage: Substantial

LOCATION
  City: VENICE                      State: FL   Country: US

DESCRIPTION
  AIRCRAFT CRASHED UNDER UNKNOWN CIRCUMSTANCES ONTO A GOLF COURSE, TWO
  PERSONS ON BOARD WERE FATALLY INJURED, AIRCRAFT WAS A SUBJECT OF AN ALERT
  NOTICE, WRECKAGE LOCATED NEAR THE VENICE AIRPORT, VENICE, FL

INJURY DATA      Total Fatal:   2
                 # Crew:   1     Fat:   1     Ser:   0     Min:   0     Unk:   
                 # Pass:    1     Fat:   1     Ser:   0     Min:   0     Unk:   
                 # Grnd:           Fat:   0     Ser:   0     Min:   0     Unk:   

WEATHER: UNK                                                                        
                                                                                    
                                                        

OTHER DATA
  Activity: Training      Phase: Unknown      Operation: General Aviation

  Departed: FORT MEYERS, FL             Dep Date: 01/17/2004   Dep. Time: 2349
  Destination: CHARLOTTE CO. ARPT       Flt Plan: UNK          Wx Briefing: U
  Last Radio Cont: 7 S OF CHARLOTTE COUNTY ARPT
  Last Clearance: RDR SERV TERM. ADVSD TO CHANGE FREQ

  FAA FSDO: TAMPA, FL  (SO35)                     Entry date: 01/20/2004

FMI: www.ntsb.gov