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