New details in fatal Sugar Grove plane crash
Sugar Grove Fire Chief Marty Kunkel immediately knew what was happening when he heard a loud engine noise and explosion Saturday night.
And he immediately took action.
Kunkel was in his garage working on a refinishing project at about 7 p.m. Saturday when a twin engine plane that had taken off at nearby Aurora Municipal Airport plunged to the ground near just outside Sugar Grove.
The pilot and his passenger were killed; no one on the ground was injured. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board would not speculate Sunday on the cause of the crash. Because the Piper Aerostar was traveling at a high speed, there is a lot of debris, making it difficult to determine what happened, authorities said.
"I heard the plane go over at a very high power." Kunkel said. "It seemed extremely low. I thought at the time, 'That's not good,' because it's foggy and cloudy. It shouldn't be that low."
Ten to 15 seconds later, he heard a loud and violent crash.
"I thought it was in my front yard," said Kunkel.
With more than 30 years of experience in the fire service, Kunkel knew what to do. He went to his car and placed a call to the dispatch center at the Montgomery Police Department. Then he headed for the scene.
When he arrived, he saw part of the fuselage of a small plane embedded in the garage.
He said a Sugar Grove police officer who also works as a firefighter in Geneva had already searched the house and assured Kunkel that everyone inside - a woman, her adult daughter and two grandchildren - had escaped uninjured. They were waiting in a neighbor's vehicle.
"They are OK," said Kane County sheriff's Lt. Patrick Gengler said. "(But) I can imagine they are pretty shook up."
Authorities said the crash instantly killed the pilot, Gary Bradford, 37, of Hollywood, Fla.; and the plane's sole passenger, Drago Strahija, 32, of Lake Worth, Fla.
Both the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration are looking into the crash.
Pam Sullivan, senior air safety investigator with the NTSB, said stating a cause "would be mere speculation at this point."
On Sunday, investigators were still carting away the wreckage. Sullivan said the goal was to move the pieces to a dry, secure location.
"It's a lot of debris, a lot of small pieces," Gengler said.
The FAA reported the plane had left the Aurora airport and was heading to Denver. The plane had arrived in the area from Texas on Friday. The men had spent the night before taking off for Denver on Saturday, authorities said.
"My understanding is that it was just a personal trip," Sullivan said.
Bradford and Strahija worked for an Information Technology consulting company called ENS Corp. based out of Hollywood, Fla. Bradford was listed as a vice president and Strahija was denoted as a systems engineer on various Web sites. Attempts to reach company officials were unsuccessful.
Bradford's family was unreachable and Strahija's mother and girlfriend said they did not want to speak.
Bradford was an instrument-rated pilot. Strahija was not a licensed pilot, authorities said.
Sullivan said the plane was equipped for instrument flight. She said the airplane took off from Aurora's Runway 9 at 6:52 p.m.
Gengler said that at about that time, the sheriff's office received an emergency call from a witness claiming to have seen a fireball on the ground near a residence in Sugar Grove Township, in unincorporated Kane County. Sullivan said most of the fire came after the impact of the crash.
Responding deputies found that the plane had crashed just north of the residence located at 43W420 Old Oaks Road. Deputies said the plane appeared to have struck the ground and disintegrated into debris.
Some of the debris clipped the attached garage of the single-family home just off Route 47, starting a fire in one of the three cars parked in the garage.
Gengler said the fire damage was mostly to the garage.
The crash came just weeks after another deadly crash near Wheeling's Chicago Executive Airport. On Jan. 5, a Learjet flying out of Detroit crashed in a Cook County forest preserve near the airport, killing two Michigan men. Authorities continue to investigate the cause of that crash, as well.
In Sugar Grove, Gengler said the heavily wooded area near Waubonsee Community College has seen plane crashes in the past, but none of that intensity that he could recall.
Nearby, along the side of the Route 47, stood two white crosses, each festooned flowers in several colors. Against each cross was propped a stuffed animal.
<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Video</h2> <ul class="video"> <!-- Start of Brightcove Player --> <div style="display:none"> </div> <!-- By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C found at http://corp.brightcove.com/legal/terms_publisher.cfm. --> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://admin.brightcove.com/js/BrightcoveExperiences.js"></script> <object id="myExperience63135846001" class="BrightcoveExperience"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /> <param name="width" value="300" /> <param name="height" value="255" /> <param name="playerID" value="18011347001" /> <param name="publisherID" value="1659832549"/> <param name="isVid" value="true" /> <param name="@videoPlayer" value="63135846001" /> </object> <!-- End of Brightcove Player --> </ul> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=353455">Two dead in Sugar Grove plane crash <span class="date">[01/23/10]</span></a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>