The preliminary report for the plane crash that killed a flight student and injured a flight instructor in East Haven has been released by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The report does not provide a lot of new information but does give some clues as to what may have gone wrong.
The airplane that crashed on Feb. 22 was performing touch-and-go landings on one of the runways at Tweed-New Haven Airport. After three uneventful landings, the plane took off and shortly after, one of the pilots declared a "mayday" on the air traffic control tower frequency. The pilot did not specify the nature of the emergency, the report reads.
During the mayday call, another flight instructor flying by the airport heard the call and stated they heard the airplane's stall warning horn in the background. After the mayday the airplane spun to the left and hit the ground about 1,000 feet southeast of the departure end of the runway.
The plane was mostly intact when it was found. The report states the propeller remained on the plane and the propeller blades did not show any rotational damage.
Last week, 31-year-old flying student Pablo Campos Isona and the 20-year-old instructor Rafayel Hany Wassef were in the Piper PA-38 Tomahawk when the single-engine plane went down in a marshy area in East Haven, near Tweed New Haven Airport, just before 10 a.m.
It was not clear who was controlling the plane at the time of the crash.
State records list Wethersfield resident Arian Prevalla as the owner of American Flight Academy, a flight school opened at Tweed Airport in 2014. Prevalla, a flight instructor, also founded Connecticut Flight Academy in 2006.
In October, Prevalla survived a plane crash that killed Feras Freitekh, who died of smoke inhalation.
