The pilot who died in a crash that destroyed a vintage plane and also left his passenger dead has been identified.
Cowden Ward and his passenger, who was a WWII B-17 pilot, died after the plane crashed in the parking lot of a Fredericksburg apartment complex Saturday afternoon.
A spokesperson with the Federal Aviation Administration said it involved a World War II P-51D Mustang fighter plane and happened around 3:15 p.m.
The FAA gave KXAN the plane’s tail number, which is N4132A, and according to their website it is registered to a corporation called Pea Hochso LLC, a company out of Burnet.
KXAN’s sister station, KLBK in Lubbock, previously interviewed Ward about his P-51 “Pecos Bill” vintage aircraft and his dedication to taking war veterans on free, honorary flights. In the story, video from the cockpit shows the tail number of Pecos Bill, which matches the tail number of the plane in the crash.
“I, all of a sudden, hear[d] something that is not right,” said Robin Walper who witnessed the crash. “It was obviously a plane. I just watched it, and I said something’s very very wrong. The right wing tip tipped further to the right, and it just started teetering over and went straight down.”
Walper told KXAN she’s flown in vintage airplanes before. She has a model of the P-51 airplane, and she was an aerial photographer.
“Something wasn’t right,” Walper said as she recalled what she heard. “When I heard it and got out there and saw that it was flying too low, right after the right wing tipped to the right, I heard nothing, as if there was no engine, and then down, and then there was the explosion.”
The plane crashed into the parking of the Friendship Place Apartments on South Creek Street.
The National Museum of the Pacific War tweeted, two people were on the plane at the time. They both died.
Before that, the museum tweeted that both of those people were veterans, but they corrected it and said only one of those people were veterans.
The Museum was hosting a Pacific Combat Program Saturday that started at 2 p.m., according to an event on their Facebook page.
“I really can’t wrap my mind around that too well because I am the mother of an Army solder, so that’s really difficult,” Walper said.
She also told us P-51’s are very unique planes.
“They were huge in WWII,” she said. “They were escorts of the bombers, and they also did their own recon work, and sometimes ground work checking things out. But they were absolutely required in WWII. They were a huge huge factor.”
FAA investigators and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash.
(Information from KXAN.com)