The holiday weekend was marred by two crashes out West that claimed the lives of a total of 12 people, including a former Philadelphia Phillies pitcher, in two separate crashes, one in Utah and the other in Idaho.
In the Utah crash, former Phillies’ hurler Tyson Brummett, who was piloting the Cessna 172, and three passengers were killed when the Cessna Skyhawk 172 he was piloting crashed in West Jordan, Utah, in a canyon of the Wasatch Mountains.
A witness claims to have seen the plane “corkscrew” into the ground. The NTSB is investigating, and they’ll surely be looking to see if the crash is a low-speed loss of control in high terrain, the same kind of accident that claimed the lives of two in an Icon A5 at Lake Berryessa, California. The plane was an Icon A5 amphibian with two employees aboard. NTSB investigators said the probable cause of the crash was flight into rising terrain resulting in a stall/spin accident.
Brummett, who was originally from Mississippi, pitched in college at UCLA and played mostly in the minor leagues, making just a single major league appearance. Another former Phillies pitcher, Hall of Famer Roy Halladay, was killed in the crash of an Icon A5 in Florida in 2017.
Meanwhile, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, two sightseeing planes, a Cessna 206 and a de Havilland Beaver, collided over Lake Coeur d’Alene on Sunday afternoon. Both planes crashed, and all eight occupants, four in each plane, are presumed to have died in the tragic accident. The planes sank and are under approximately 125 feet of water, and recovery efforts are under way, authorities said.
Pilots familiar with operations at the Coeur d’Alene wrote yesterday evening that terrain considerations make spotting traffic while flying at the busy airport particularly challenging, as arriving and departing flights are funneled though a section of lower terrain between the airport and the lake.
NTSB investigators are on scene in Coeur d’Alene.
