At least seven passengers are presumed dead after a vintage World War II-era B17 bomber that came to the Martha’s Vineyard Airport two weeks ago as part of a traveling exhibit crashed in Hartford, Conn., Wednesday.
Two Navy fliers lost their lives off Cape Pogue soon after 10 o’clock Tuesday morning when their dive bomber, in which they were making practice dives at a target, failed to come out of a dive and plunged into the sea. They were from Quonset Naval Air Station.
This time on purpose, United States Coast Guard officers came to Martha’s Vineyard Wednesday night, to say a fervent thank-you to an Island harbormaster.
He is John M. Edwards of Edgartown, and he earned the citation presented to him at a ceremony in the board room of the Co-operative Bank by delivering a Coast Guard helicopter to safety from a forced landing at night on the rip-swept open sea off the Katama beach.
In a chilling midsummer tragedy that made overnight headlines around the world and quickly put the Vineyard beneath the harsh spotlight of the national media, a small airplane flown by John F. Kennedy Jr. plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the western end of the Island on Friday night.
A single engine aircraft had a rough landing at Katama Airpark Monday. The pilot of the Piper Cherokee PA-32-26 was unhurt, but the propeller and nose of the plane were damaged. The Edgartown fire department and state police responded to the grass airfield.
A six-passenger aircraft veered off the main runway at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport shortly before noon Saturday when the plane’s landing gear collapsed. The pilot, a passenger, and a dog, were unhurt, officials said.
Allen P. Spaulding Jr., 70, was the sole occupant of the 1965 fixed-wing Maule Bee Dee M-4-210 that crashed Wednesday morning on Cuttyhunk, state police said. The pilot was determined to be dead at the scene.
State police late Wednesday identified the pilot in a fatal morning plane crash on Cuttyhunk as Allen P. Spaulding Jr., 70, of Wilmington De.
Police said the facts and circumstances surrounding the crash remain under investigation.
Mr. Spaulding, a longtime resident of Cuttyhunk, was the sole occupant of a 1965 fixed-wing Maule Bee Dee M-4-210 aircraft that crashed on a remote strip of land at the west end of the island. Cuttyhunk lies at the tip of the Elizabeth islands chain, to the west of Martha's Vineyard.
An investigator into the Jan. 30 crash of a Cape Air plane in the
state forest this week released the transcript of the dialogue between
the pilot and air traffic controllers. It is still unknown what caused
the airplane crash that seriously injured both the pilot and passenger.
Federal and state investigators continue their inquiry into the
causes of a commuter airplane crash early Tuesday night in the Manuel F.
Correllus State Forest. Both the plane's pilot and its sole
passenger remain hospitalized.
