Indian student pilot, Swedish flight instructor die in Florida crash
Boynton Beach, FL: A plane crash in a gated golf community in suburban Boynton Beach that killed two men and critically injured a third Saturday night left authorities scrambling Sunday to notify families across the globe.
The closest relatives for Anders Selberg, a 46-year-old flight instructor from Port St. Lucie who died, are in Sweden. The family of two trainees – 18-year-old Arjun Chhikara, who also died, and 38-year-old Chandrashekhar Godghate, who remains hospitalized – are in India.
National Transportation Safety Board officials from Washington assumed control of the wreckage of the single-engine Piper on Sunday afternoon. Though the plane’s distress call came in to the Palm Beach International Airport as engine failure, the NTSB will make the official ruling on what caused the crash.
The plane smashed into one of the greens on the golf course, which is surrounded by single-family homes and condos.
The instructor and trainees were with Kemper Aviation, a flight school based at the Lantana airport. On its Web site, Kemper lists an office in India .
The two crash victims from India were not related and were only in town for the flight lessons, Barbera said. They stayed at an apartment in Lake Worth.
Selberg was a certified flight instructor, ground instructor and airline transport pilot, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.
To further complicate an expansive web of locations connected to the crash, the plane is registered to Day Trippin Airlines of Olathe, Kan. Barbera said investigators did not know why.
The plane took off Saturday from the Lantana airport, flew to Opa-locka and was returning to Lantana when it sent out a distress call at 8:15 p.m. The crash site was less than 5 miles from the Lantana airport. The Piper flipped over on impact, said Barbera, the sheriff’s spokeswoman.
She said investigators initially could not spot the wreckage from the sheriff’s Eagle helicopter, but then heard the telltale beep of the plane’s beacon, a device designed for emergencies.
29/10/07 Allyson Bird/Palm Beach Post, USA