HARRISBURG (TNS) — A private plane landed on a Pennsylvania Turnpike ramp and crashed into a utility truck in a fatal incident on Wednesday.
According to a source briefed on some aspects of the accident, the plane had some kind of mechanical problem and the pilot was trying to land it at Capital City Airport, which is about 1 mile east of the crash site in Fairview Township, York County.
Preliminary Federal Aviation Administration reports show that the plane came down near the Turnpike’s Harrisburg West interchange and collided about 2:30 p.m. with a utility truck.
Registration records for the Cessna 180 aircraft show the four-seat plane is registered to Kenneth Sager of Derry Township, Dauphin County.
A friend of Sager told PennLive Thursday that he was hospitalized in intensive care with injuries, but was able to speak with his wife Wednesday evening.
The other person on board the flight was killed, and he was identified as 74-year-old Lawrence Sager of Harrisburg.
PennLive has not yet been able to independently corroborate who was flying at the time.
The plane was hangared at Farmers Pride Airport in Bethel Township, Lebanon County.
No advance flight plans are required of a privately-owned plane like Sager’s, but commercial flight tracking systems show the plane was on its third relatively short flight of the day when the crash occurred.
The communications tracking by FlightAware suggests there was a first flight to Western Pennsylvania about 8:20 a.m., followed by a second flight to a destination near Morgantown, W.Va. about 10:45 a.m. The plane headed back to central Pennsylvania around 1:45 p.m.
“I know he was gone all day,” said Alletta Schadler, airport manager at Farmers Pride. “We don’t record when people come and go… People hangar their own airplanes, and they get them out and they go whenever they want to. But that sounds like it could have been possible.”
Schadler said Kenneth Sager is a retired airline pilot with a lot of experience flying.
Ted Czech with York County’s emergency management office said the truck is believed to have been driving on the Turnpike’s exit ramp when it was struck.
The driver of the truck was not seriously injured, Czech said.
