CALLAWAY — Helicopters churned in a cloudless blue sky early Wednesday morning, scouring the deep woods of southeast Bay County for the wreckage of a Destin-bound plane.
By then, more than an hour had passed since Tyndall Air Force Base reported losing radio contact with a distressed pilot near the Sandy Creek area.
Larry Eli Caison, 52, was piloting a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza G36 from North Palm Beach County General Aviation to Destin Airport, but the plane began a sudden descent from 7,900 feet at 6:46 a.m. CST, according to North Florida Flight Center of Jacksonville reports.
With the plane traveling at 155 mph, Caison called in an engine-related problem and was diverted to Sandy Creek Airpark, officials said. The plane then dropped 800 feet in three minutes before communications ceased.
Caison was found dead on the scene, only about 50 yards from a grass clearing of the airpark’s paved landing strip, at 9:01 a.m. CST, according to Capt. Ricky Ramie with the Bay County Sheriff’s Office.
“He wasn’t that far from the strip,” Ramie said. “He had about 50 yards before he made the clearing where he could’ve landed. Now, that’s tragic.”
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will lead the investigation into the crash. NTSB reported 76 crashes of Beechcraft planes in Florida within the past decade. The crashes resulted in 36 fatalities.
Search
BCSO and the Callaway Fire Department had crews on the ground searching for the crash site by 7:23 a.m. CST. Neither flames nor smoke gave away the plane’s location deep in the woods. BCSO could not find the aircraft until a helicopter was directly above the wreckage, Ramie said.
The Sheriff’s Office and the county’s Emergency Operations Center cut a trail through the thick woods about 200 yards east of Sandy Creek Airpark with the help of a county bulldozer.
In 15 years of living in the neighborhood next to the airpark, Frank Carpenter could recall only one other time a pilot came in for an emergency landing at Sandy Creek. An aircraft Carpenter described as an “Air Force helicopter” completed a safe landing once upon a time.
A former commercial pilot and maintenance manager of Sandy Creek Airpark, Carpenter said the 20-mile circumference of timberlands surrounding the 4,000-foot-long and 60-foot-wide Sandy Creek landing strip obscures the roads, which rule out a lot of
other landing options for distressed pilots. Other roads in the area are dirt or gravel.
“We’ve known people who get into trouble and look for an open field; you look for something,” Carpenter said. “As for options, where he was at doesn’t offer much.”