12News meteorologist Chris Dunn offers insight on Arizona plane crash

PHOENIX — A midair collision involving two small planes in southern Arizona killed two people Wednesday morning, authorities said.

As a flight instructor and pilot himself, 12News Meteorologist Chris Dunn has flown at the Marana Regional Airport where the crash happened. He spoke with 12News journalists about the conditions of the airport and offered his insight on the crash.

Federal air safety investigators said each plane had two people aboard when they collided.

One plane landed uneventfully and the other hit the ground near a runway and caught fire, said the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation and cited preliminary information before its investigators had arrived.

The Marana Police Department confirmed that the two people killed were aboard one aircraft and said responders did not have a chance to provide medical treatment. Sgt. Vincent Rizzi said the two people on the other plane were uninjured.

Neither the Lancair nor the Cessna 172 was based out of the airport, according to a statement from the town of Marana.

The collision came more than a week after a plane crash in Scottsdale killed one of two pilots of a private jet owned by Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil. That aircraft veered off a runway and hit a business jet.

“It’s very common to do a lot of flight training at Marana, especially for some of the big flight schools in the Phoenix area,” Dunn explained. 

The airport does not have a control tower, which Dunn said is surprising to many people, but what’s even more surprising? 

Most of the airports in the United States do not have a control tower, Dunn said. 

“Say you’re driving down the street and you encounter a stop light. That’s air traffic control,” Dunn explained. “If you come to a four-way intersection, that’s kind of the equivalent of a non-towered field. It’s up to the pilots to figure out how to enter the structured pattern around the airport.”

Dunn said many mid-air crashes happen just as the one in Arizona did: at the airport and in good weather conditions. 

Investigators working on this crash will likely be looking for a few things, Dunn said:

• Whether the two pilots were on the same frequency, which allows them to hear one another
• If the pilots knew where one another was at the airport 

But even as more details become clear, Dunn said sometimes, a crash doesn’t occur for a clear-cut reason.

“Sometimes it’s just a tragic coincidence that two airplanes meet in the sky at the same time,” Dunn said. 

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