Tropic Air makes emergency landing at sea
It’s not as common an occurrence as road collisions, but over the weekend, one more plane crash was added to the country’s list of air incidents. Around nine-forty on Sunday morning, Roy Bradley, piloting a Tropic Air Caravan made an emergency landing in the waters near Belizean Beach. The plane had just taken off from the Belize City Municipal Airstrip and was taking four US nationals to the P.G.I.A. when the pilot noticed that something was wrong. But while the plane appeared to have sustained major damage, only one male passenger received minor injuries. Tropic President John Grief spoke to News Five via phone this morning and told us that while they have their suspicions as to what transpired, they are investigating.
John Grief, President, Tropic Air
“All of them were pretty much pressured by our insurance company to get evaluated medically. They know that in the past that people feel okay but there might be something wrong with them. So they were all evaluated at Belize Medical Associates and the two of them—I believe actually all of them, there were couples—are leaving today. One gentleman received cuts to the head that the doctors classified as superficial and that was all. We are suspecting a complete engine failure, but we can’t be sure of that yet. We haven’t actually had a chance to completely debrief the pilot and we’re just getting inspectors along with Civil Aviation to the aircraft this morning.”
Kendra Griffith
“What would cause the engine failure?”
John Grief
“Well this was a practically new engine in this airplane. This engine was less than six months from factory. New, not overhauled, completely new and I wouldn’t want to speculate. It’s very rare, but it does happen.”
Kendra Griffith
“Anything that you want to tell your customers?”
John Grief
“Well, we’d like to thank them for their patronage and let them know that airplanes are built by humans and sometimes things go wrong and we would appreciate if they would stick by us.”
The four passengers, Jonathon Brady, Lindsay Brady, David Yorke and Gay Yorke, were all from Texas.
