Crash has neighbors concerned

Jace Radke

Monday, May 21, 2001 | 11:15 a.m.

A plane crash that killed the pilot Saturday has left a North Las Vegas neighborhood in the path of the flight a little nervous.

Franklin Pierce Street, 69, of North Las Vegas, was trying to make an emergency landing at the North Las Vegas Airport after reporting mechanical problems, but the plane clipped a streetlight pole and crashed near the intersection of Michael Way and Cheyenne Avenue, Las Vegas Fire Department spokesman Tim Szymanski said.

The accident remains under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board and Metro Police.

Jessica Gappa is used to the constant buzz of small planes flying over her home on the way to the North Las Vegas Airport.

"You get used to the planes flying over, but it's a little scary when they crash," Gappa said.

On Saturday morning as Gappa and some friends were getting ready to head to Lake Mead for a day of boating, the single-engine plane crashed in a dirt lot a couple hundred yards from her home.

Gappa's friend, Robbie Hanson, said that the crash had been a topic of conversation for them at the lake, as he cleaned the group's boat in front of Gappa's home on Rancher Avenue Sunday.

"We were wondering if you can get plane insurance," Hanson said. "The scary thing is that its a lot of private pilots, and you don't know how much training they might have."

The Beechcraft Bonanza crashed about a mile west of the airport, settling upside-down in the dirt lot, Szymanski said.

Witnesses said that they saw and heard the aircraft approaching, and saw it shear a streetlight pole and crash to the ground, nearly landing on a woman on the sidewalk, Szymanski said. The plane cart-wheeled through a chain-link fence and finally stopped about 100 feet into the lot.

About 10 people tried to pull Street from the plane, but he was pinned inside, and special equipment would later have to be used to remove his body, Szymanski said.

The last fatal crash at the airport occurred a year ago, when a Cessna slammed into the ground and burst into flames in April 2000. The two people on board the plane were killed when it crashed on airport grounds near a runway.

Two people were killed in an August 1999 crash into the front yard of a northwest Las Vegas home as the pilot approached the airport. Nine days later another pilot crashed into a nearby vacant lot.

The North Las Vegas Airport is the second busiest airport in Nevada behind only McCarran International Airport.