MORTON – Investigators are still unsure what caused a four-passenger Cirrus SR22 aircraft to crash land in the front yard of a home just outside of Morton on State Route 508 Friday evening.
The pilot was killed and a female passenger was transported to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
A neighbor, Bob Thomas, who lives across the highway from the home where the plane went down, was the first person on the scene.
“There was dead silence, and all of a sudden I heard a loud ‘Kaboom,’” Thomas recalled as he described the event Saturday afternoon. “There was no engine sputter or anything. I thought maybe Chetty had blown himself up or something.”
But Chet Erskine IV, who lives in the house across the road with his wife, Sarah, and their two young children, was not at home.
In fact, nobody was home on the still, partially sunny evening when the plane landed, narrowly missing the chicken coop, wiping out the fence and tearing a hole 4 feet long and 3 feet deep in the yard.
“I’m just glad the kids weren’t out there playing,” Thomas said.
Thomas had been out in his driveway working on his truck when the crash occurred. He didn’t see it happen, he said, but he and other neighbors as far as half a mile away heard the noise.
Thomas, a construction worker who has lived with his wife in their current home for about 10 years, took off running across the highway and down the Erskines’ driveway to investigate. As soon as he saw the wreckage in the yard, he called 911 on his cell phone.
“I could see right off that the pilot was dead,” he said. “But the woman was awake. I calmed her down while we waited for help. But she was trapped in there. I couldn’t have gotten her out.”
Rescue workers were on the scene within about five minutes, Thomas said. They had to cut the woman from the wreckage.
Teams from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board were on site Saturday to investigate.
Kristi Dunks, an air safety investigator, reported that witnesses said they’d seen the airplane traveling west to east on Friday before crashing at around 7:15 p.m.
The wreckage indicated that the aircraft’s emergency parachute system had been deployed sometime during the accident, but Dunks did not have any further information on what may have occurred.
“At this point we’re not looking at the cause, we’re looking at the facts,” she said.
This particular airplane does not have a flight recorder, Dunks said, but some of the advanced avionics equipment on board may reveal something of what happened.
Investigators planned to wrap up their on-scene work Saturday evening. They will release a preliminary report of their findings in the next few days.
News sources out of Seattle reported Saturday that the pilot was identified by family members as 39-year-old Shane Sullivan of Bellevue.
