Updated ,first published
The light plane that crashed at a small airstrip south of Brisbane, killing the pilot of almost 50 years and his passenger, was a kit aircraft that had been involved in a serious accident years earlier and was powered by a car engine.
Pilot Greg Ackman, 73, from Beenleigh, and his passenger, Tony Scopelliti from Sydney, were pulled from the plane after the crash early on Tuesday at Heck Field, an airstrip within the Gold Coast Sport Flying Club at Jacobs Well.
The aircraft had crash-landed shortly after take-off and skidded off the runway, igniting a massive grassfire that burned for hours.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s Angus Mitchell told Nine the plane was an Avanti kit-built aircraft.
He said the plane was run by the same engine as a car.
“It’s a Subaru — a turbocharged four-cylinder engine in there,” Mitchell said.
He said the ATSB needed to “painstakingly piece together what we can from the accident”.
“We’ve got some quite telling CCTV footage from the airfield here, but probably more importantly, we’ve got some audio and the audio is probably going to give us a far greater clue as to the engine at the time,” he said.
“We know that it appeared to be laboured as it was taking off, far more so than what we would expect.”
Mitchell said the aircraft had been registered since about 2006.
“It’s getting up to 20 years old.
“It was involved in quite a serious accident back in about 2010, so certainly we’ll be focusing on the maintenance over the life of the aircraft.”
He said the safety bureau had previously researched kit-built crafts’ reliability and found they were involved in accidents more frequently than planes built in factories.
A friend said Ackman had flown since he was a teenager and owned several aircraft – all with a distinctive red nose.
Police Superintendent Brett Jackson said CCTV vision of the crash taken at the airstrip would form part of the investigation.
Heck Field is a private airfield where people rent hangars and conduct private flights.
A flight plan lodged with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority indicated the plane was headed to a town near Tamworth in north-east NSW.
Fire crews said the plane came to rest in bushland off the end of the runway, and a plume of smoke was seen rising from the aircraft.
Cane fields and grasslands caught fire and Ackman and Scopelliti were trapped in the cockpit.
Several fire crews fought the blaze alongside SES personnel, with a total of about 50 officers. The fire was contained by 4.45pm, and emergency crews were still monitoring the scene and conducting backburns at 7.30pm – about 14 hours after the crash.
Smoke from the fire affected people in the area, including schools.
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