DEERFIELD BEACH — A buzzing, sputtering single-engine plane slammed nose- first onto the edge of a parking lot near the Deer Creek Country Club on Friday afternoon, killing all four people aboard.
Witnesses rushed to the plane and urged the passengers to stay calm until help arrived. They were already dead. Seconds later, the fuel gushing from the engine exploded, gutting the cockpit and charring the front of the fuselage, streaking the wings with soot.
Moments later, a panicked man arrived as flames consumed the front half of the plane.
“He asked where the people were who got off the plane,” said Herb Ciezadlo, a Deerfield Beach city worker who was the first person at the scene. “I said, ‘No one got off the plane.’
“He said, ‘Oh no, oh my God, my son is in there.”
Firefighters, who doused the plane with foam to extinguish the fire, finally pulled an anguished Richard Clery from the scene.
The only confirmed fatality was pilot John Richard Clery, 26, who lived with his father in the Deer Creek neighborhood. Clery was licensed as a pilot and flight instructor with the FAA. Two of the other victims were described as employees of the Deer Creek Country Club.
The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office said identities of the other victims would not be available until this morning. Because of the fire, investigators will use dental records to identify the bodies.
The four had taken off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport and were flying above the Deer Creek Golf Club, taking aerial photos of the course before it closes on Monday for several months of renovations.
The plane was moving slowly and banking steeply so the photographer could get a clear view.
Some witnesses said the engine of the Cessna 172 Skyhawk II sputtered as the aircraft looped in from the northwest, dropping lower and lower. It cleared a stand of tall pine trees. Then the engine stopped. The plane plunged onto a grassy swale just east of Deer Creek Road near Hillsboro Beach Boulevard about 1:49 p.m.
Other witnesses, though, said the engine sounded fine.
But everyone agreed the white and blue plane was traveling very slowly before it dropped straight down toward the parking lot at Constitution Park.
Mike Meszaros, 22, and John Cook, 21, of Novi, Mich., were playing tennis in the park when they saw the airplane stumbling across the sky. It looked as if the pilot was doing tricks, Meszaros said.
“(Cook) said, ‘Look, isn’t that cool?”‘ Meszaros said. “I looked up and saw it flying low. The next thing I know, it hit. It hit hard, right on the nose.”
“I heard it,” Ciezadlo said. “I heard the engine hesitating as it went over. Then the engine cut off and a couple of seconds later, it hit. It cut off while he was still up there.”
Ciezadlo threw his truck into gear and rushed over to the plane, grabbing his fire extinguisher as he ran to the wreckage.
“I blasted it with the extinguisher but the extinguisher was nothing,” he said. “The fuel was pouring out like you spilled it from a glass. Then it exploded and the concussion blew me back.”
Mescaros said onlookers could only watch, stunned at what had happened.
“We didn’t know what to do,” Cook said. “We started running up toward the plane, but this guy yelled at us to get back. We looked at the plane and saw fuel coming out of it. We stepped back, and it just blew up.”
The Cessna 172 is the world’s most popular general aviation aircraft, and it is suited for aerial photography because the wings are mounted above the cockpit.
But aerial photography can be tricky.
Dean Ramsowr, a pilot at Heliflight at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport who often flies photographers on aerial assignments, prefers to use a helicopter. Shooting from a plane requires almost constant maneuvering by the pilot so the plane’s wings don’t obscure the photos.
“And you have to fly slow. If you fly too slow, the plane stalls. And if you are too low, you don’t have time to recover,” he said. “When you’re low and the airplane stalls, it’s coming down and there’s not a lot you can do about it.”
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were at the scene within 90 minutes of the crash, standing by as the victims were taken from the wreckage, then poking through it, looking for answers.
NTSB investigator Tim Monville said he doubted Clery was trying to make an emergency landing, as some witnesses said.
“He didn’t land; he was out of control,” Monville said. “The (plane) dipped 70 degrees with its left wing low.”
Investigators photographed the scene, measured distances and gauged the plane’s route. They found more questions than answers.
“We have to make sure there was no failure of the flight controls to determine if he could control the plane,” Monville said. “It also could be a problem with the pilot. Maybe he had some kind of physical problem. There could be a thousand reasons.”
And as the investigators began looking for the reason that would solve the puzzle before them, residents of the Racquet Club of Deer Creek apartments lined the flapping yellow police tape that criss-crossed the roadways and snaked around the parking lot.
Ciezadlo was there, too, hours later, patiently retelling his story for each reporter who stopped, for residents, for the curious passers-by who wandered in, wondering what had happened. The shock, finally, was wearing off.
“I feel OK now,” he said later. “At first my heart was beating like crazy and I was out of breath.”
Ciezadlo is a certified fire-rescue worker and has seen people near death before, people pulled from car crashes and slashed by broken glass.
But that was different, he said.
“Those times, at least you could do something. You could do something to help,” Ciezadlo said.
“Today I felt so helpless.”
Staff Writers Alan Cherry and Marisa Porto contributed to this story.
