On April 9,2020, a student pilot and his instructor crashed into trees 2,000 feet from the departure end of the runway after practicing a touch-and-go landing. They both died. A lawsuit filed this year against the airport authority alleges the crash was caused by taller-than-FAA-standard trees. The U.S. court system may or may not eventually decide the merits of that case. What we do know, thanks to a recently released National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report, is how the pilots ended up in the woods. Leaving a little after 8 p.m., the pair flew 60 apparently uneventful miles from their home base of Myrtle Beach International Airport (KMYR) in South Carolina on a direct course to the Mount Pleasant Regional Airport-Faison Field (KLRO), also in South Carolina. It was a night instructional flight, planned with a return back to Myrtle Beach. The student pilot had five hours of total flight time, all in his newly purchased 2009 Arion Aircraft Lightning LS-1. The flight instructor had over 12,000 hours of flight time; however, the NTSB doesn't say how much experience he had in the Lightning LS-1. It's a sleek-looking two-seat, 120-horsepower fixed tricycle gear experimental light-sport airplane (LSA) built using composite materials.
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