A flight-school seaplane reported to have taken off from Flagler County Executive Airport this morning flipped and crashed in Crescent Lake, according to the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office. There were no injuries. The crash took place as a groundbreaking ceremony was unfolding at the Flagler airport.
“At about 10:15 a.m. we received a phone call that a resident saw a plane flip in the water near Bear Island,” a Putnam County Sheriff’s statement on the agency’s Facebook page states. “A nearby resident took his boat to the plane as rescue crews traveled in route. The pilot and co-pilot were safety recovered from the plane with no known injuries. The two-seater seaplane is a fixed-wing single-engine that reportedly took off from Flagler County’s airport as part of a flight from an aviation school.”
Bear Island is equidistant from the shores of Flagler County to the east and Putnam County and Crescent City to the west, and a little more than halfway south along Crescent Lake, which stretches north to south.
The plane would have taken off from Flagler County’s airport around the time when airport and officials in Flagler were marking the groundbreaking of a new airside operations building. The event took place as fixed-wing planes took off and landed at regular intervals.
The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office was the initial responder on scene. The Florida Highway Patrol conducted the preliminary investigation before turning it over to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates all plane crashes. If it is determined that the plane crashed on Flagler County’s side of the lake, it would be the second plane crash this year in the county (and the 25th in the state). The first, in mid-February, took the life of a veteran skydiving pilot, Thomas Harvey, when his Eagle Air Transport Plane crashed in an isolated part of southwest Flagler County.
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