Two separate crashes hours apart have marred this year’s EAA AirVenture, an aviation enthusiast gathering and airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The crashes left four people dead and two injured. The aircraft in the incidents weren’t participating in the airshow but were owned by event attendees. The first incident involved a single-engine plane crashing into Lake Winnebago, then a helicopter and gyrocopter colliding in mid-air at Wittman Regional Airport.
ABC News reported that a North American T-6 Texan crashed around 9 a.m. local time. The World War II-era aircraft crashed into Lake Winnebago shortly after taking off from Wittman Regional Airport, the EAA AirVenture’s host facility. The two people onboard the T-6 were killed. The Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office stated that several agencies responded to the crash, and the U.S. Coast Guard recovered the bodies of the people killed. The next crash would happen three and a half hours later.
At 12:30 p.m. local time, a Rotorway 162F helicopter and an ELA Eclipse 10 gyrocopter collided in mid-air over the south end of the EAA AirVenture flight line. The gyrocopter came down on top of a parked plane. According to WLUK, the Oshkosh Fire Department responded to both downed aircraft and United States Air Force firefighters on the scene extinguished the gyrocopter’s wreckage. The crash killed two people, while two others were rushed to the hospital, where they are now in stable condition.
Dick Knapinski, EAA director of communications, told WLUK, “The NTSB is now leading the investigation into that collision and find out exactly what happened. They’ll look into the conditions, who was flying the airplane, experience within these aircraft and what the air traffic was in that area at the time.”