Two pilots have died after their plane crashed into a house at Plaisance, East Coast Demerara.
The two men, Captain Gerry Gouveia has confirmed, are foreigners and so is the aircraft.
Stabroek News understands that the plane crashed into a house at Plaisance. The house is owned by Florence Tyndall.
GINA tonight stated that the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCCA) has mounted an investigation into the crash of the US-registered aircraft.
It said that according to eyewitnesses, the aircraft, identified as a twin-engine Piper Aztec with registration number N27-FT, had just taken off from the Ogle Airport when its engines began misfiring. The engines then reportedly lost power and the pilot attempted to land in the Plaisance Community playfield but failed, striking the top of a coconut tree before crashing into a house and exploding on impact.
GINA said that the owner of the house at Lot 78, Sparendaam Housing Scheme, 69-year old Florence Dyer-Tyndall, was at the rear of the wooden house and escaped from harm by fleeing after her house caught afire from the aircraft’s impact.
Public Works Minister Robeson Benn told GINA that the small aircraft was on a technical survey mission for the Amaila Falls hydropower access road to conduct a LIDAR survey for the best geometrical and other alignments for the road. It was said to be contracted from the Miami-based Angiel EnviroSafe Inc, which offers aerial camera platform services, GINA said. Benn said that from initial reports, the cause of the crash appeared to have been engine failure.
“It took off with six hours of fuel from Ogle Airport and it looks like it lost an engine and then crashed,” Benn told reporters at the crash site.
Director General of the GCCA, Zulfikar Mohammed, said investigators would be going through the rubble and taking eyewitness accounts.
“We have to go through the site and look at whatever is available and use first hand information-observers’ information- and you take whatever is available there and do an analysis. We have to retrieve the engines to ensure that they are properly examined to determine if that was part of the cause of the accident”, GINA reported him as saying.
Mohammed added that the plane had just refuelled and was about to embark on a second mission for the day when it went down, GINA added.
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