They Heard A Humming. Without Warning Came The Plane Crash

The flight that resulted in a crash that killed two experienced Burlington County pilots lasted six minutes or fewer, and there was no warning that the plane was going to crash, an investigator assigned to the accident said late Thursday afternoon.

Robert Winner, 69, of Marlton, and 71-year-old Timothy Scannevin, of Southampton, were identified as the two victims in a small plane crash in Springfield Township that took place on Wednesday. Winner was the pilot and Scannevin was the passenger. There were no other passengers on the flight.

No one else was injured when the Hawker Beechcraft 58 Baron aircraft crashed into a wooded area near the intersection of Smithville Jacksonville Road and Oxmead Road early Wednesday morning.

The crash did take some on the ground by surprise, though. Garrett Andrew Rodriguez-Maribona didn't even know what he had just seen when he called 911 at 9:10 a.m., six minutes after Winner got clearance from Air Traffic Control to take off from South Jersey Regional Airport.

Moments after Rodriguez-Maribona called 911, a man arrived in a pickup truck and told him he had heard a humming and a loud sound that sounded like an airplane before seeing the crash.

This account was relayed by Tim Monville, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Senior Air Safety Investigator assigned to the case, during a press briefing late Thursday afternoon.

The flight reached 1,300 feet and made a right, descending turn before disappearing from the radar, Monville said. There was also no distress call.

“It appears the plane went through one set of trees, crossed the road and went through another set of trees and landed in an empty field,” Monville said. “The fragmentation was caused by the trees.”

Monville didn't speculate as to why there might not have been a distress call before the crash.

By the time Rodriguez-Maribona and the man in the pickup truck began to examine the scene, the plane was unrecognizable. Debris lie across the field and across the street. The scene was captured in a video that can be seen below. The video only shows pieces of the plane, including the propeller, and includes foul language. Viewer discretion advised.

Those fragments are being collected by the investigative team, led by Monville. Monville is being assisted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Beechcraft. Beechcraft is involved to lend its expertise on the plane, but the NTSB remains the lead agency in the investigation.

Once the fragments are collected, investigators will reassemble the scene in a secure location in an attempt to determine what happened. The final report, which is expected to include the final cause of the crash, isn’t expected for another 12-18 months, Monville said.

The investigation also includes interviews and follow-up interviews with witnesses and engineers, as well as drone mapping. Drone mapping is when investigators use drones to take still pictures and videos of the scene from the sky. Part of that is determining how far fragments are from each other in an effort to determine what happened.

Investigators arrived late Wednesday afternoon, and remained on site Thursday. They were expected to remain on the scene into Friday.

Winner was the owner of the plane, according to FAA records. His certificate was issued in 2005 and was valid through 2020. The plane didn’t appear to have any issues according to the records, but investigators will investigate the background of the plane further.

Scannevin was also a pilot, according to FAA records. He had been flying since at least 2013, when he purchased his plane.

They were on a mission for the volunteer medical transport service Angel Flight, according to the Courier Post. Winner was a farmer who sold his 88-acre property on Centerton Road to the county for $7.1 million in 2005. The county turned the property into the Burlington County Agricultural Center.

Winner joined the organization in 2013, and flew 16 flights for Angel Flight during that time, according to nj.com. Scannevin wasn't affiliated with Angel Flight. They were on their way to pick up a medical patient in Massachusetts to receive treatment in Philadelphia.

The plane was to have arrived at Barnstable Municipal Airport in Hyannis, Massachusetts, according to flight records. No information is known about the patient.

Image via YouTube

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