Newport crash victims identified

More information today about the victims of Thursday night’s plane crash at Newport State Airport. The Providence Journal is reporting that the two people killed were Pamela Ulich Lancaster, owner of the Dragonfly Inn in Newport, and Charles Warren Thompson, a Newport flight instructor. The man injured and rescued from the crash is Keith Ulich, a student pilot, who is still in critical condition and in an induced coma at Rhode Island Hospital.

Photo from airport-data.com

The first bit of official FAA info is now up as well. It identifies the aircraft as N9888K, a Piper Warrior (PA-28-161) owned by Charles Hallal of Westport, Massachusetts. Its initial description of the accident only reports what we already know:

AIRCRAFT ON DEPARTURE, CRASHED OFF THE END OF THE RUNWAY, THERE WERE THREE PERSONS ON BOARD, TWO WERE FATALLY INJURED, ONE SUSTAINED SERIOUS INJURIES, NEWPORT STATE AIRPORT, MIDDLETOWN, RI

Robert Gretz, a senior air safety investigator, was quoted as saying the investigation would take 180-360 days and a preliminary report would be up by July 18th.

TurnTo10.com is already bungling its reporting on the crash. They are reporting that Keith Ulich, the student pilot and survivor, was at the controls. However, the Warrior (like most small GA aircraft) has controls in both front seat positions, and that means the flight instructor would also have been “at the controls.” I think it’s safe to assume that TurnTo10 has no idea if Ulich was actually flying the plane at the time — that’ll be something the FAA will try to figure out during their investigation. TurnTo10 also says that Ulich was pulled out of the plane before it caught fire — but Ulich suffered serious burns, presumably caused by exposure to fire.

UPDATE (9/19/08): Keith Ulich, the sole survivor of the plane crash, died of his injuries after remaining in a coma for over two months. He died at 1:15 a.m. on Monday, September 15.