Cockpit transcript in Lewis Katz plane crash released
PHILADELPHIA - A cockpit voice recorder is providing some details on the Massachusetts plane crash that killed Philadelphia Inquirer co-owner Lewis Katz and six others last June.
One pilot repeated "lock is on" followed by "I can't stop it" and "oh no no" as the aircraft sped toward the end of the runway last year at Hanscom Field outside Boston. It then crashed and burst into flames.
The transcript of the recorder was among hundreds of pages of documents released Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
A preliminary NTSB report in June indicated a possible problem with the gust lock system, which protects parked planes from wind damage. It also suggested the two pilots didn't perform a pre-flight check.
Katz was a philanthropist and businessman who once co-owned the New Jersey Nets and New Jersey Devils.
The flight crew that died in the crash had flown for the millionaire businessman and philanthropist for nearly a decade, and among them was a pilot who survived an earlier fatal crash, relatives said.
The co-pilot, Bauke "Mike" de Vries, had come to the U.S. from the Netherlands as a young man to attend flight school. In the early 1990s, he was a passenger in a two-man crash that killed a pilot at a southern New Jersey airport, his wife said.
An airport employee said after the crash he watched as the Gulfstream jet raced past the end of a runway, plunged down an embankment and erupted in flames.
In addition to Katz and de Vries, the others killed in the crash were chief pilot James McDowell, flight attendant Teresa Benhoff, Katz's neighbor at the New Jersey shore Anne Leeds, the director of Katz's son's foundation Marcella Dalsey, and Susan Asbell, the wife of a former New Jersey county prosecutor.