Sparendaam plane crash…GCAA ‘did not verify’ insurance of aircraft

May 01, 2013 News

There are growing suspicions that the American-registered aircraft, a twin-engine Piper Aztec with registration N27-FT, that crashed into a Sparendaam, East Coast Demerara house three Saturdays ago, is uninsured.
According to a source, the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) did not verify if the aircraft is insured and will be approaching the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to assist in investigating whether it was insured.
If the aircraft was insured, the insurance company has been unusually slow to come forward, and this has raised eyebrows in the aviation industry. From all indications the aircraft seems to be uninsured, the source said.
When this publication contacted the FAA, it was confirmed that the aircraft is registered and owned by Pierre Angiel of Angiel EnviroSafe, Inc. However, the FAA was unable to confirm if the aircraft is insured.
Director General of the GCAA, Zulficar Mohamed, had stated that whenever foreign aircraft enter Guyana, pertinent documents such as a valid certificate of airworthiness, insurance and registration are presented to GCAA.

Flashback: The scene of the fatal crash

According to the source, the GCAA’s Air Transport Department is responsible for verifying if the aircraft is insured, but did not in this case. It is alleged that the department also breached protocol in not informing other departments of the aircraft’s presence in Guyana’s airspace.
It was revealed that some high ranking officers at GCAA only became aware of the aircraft’s presence in Guyana’s airspace when the incident occurred.
This may be to the detriment of 69-year-old home-owner, Florence Tyndall, whose house the plane crashed into killing Angiel and his passenger, Canadian Scientist Nick Dmitriev. Tyndall escaped unharmed, but is now without a house.
The two men were embarking on a technical survey mission for the Amaila Falls Access Road when the aircraft crashed just after taking off from Ogle Airport.
Investigations into the plane crash are still ongoing, with the limited personnel of GCAA having a large task of interviewing many other individuals who had any contact with the aircraft since it was in Guyana.
Information gathered thus far has led the GCAA to rule out both sabotage and suicide as the root of the incident, the source noted.
According to the source, the aircraft was expected to be in Guyana for 10 days and owing to that time constraint and the length of time it would have taken to repair the defects, Angiel chose not to fix the plane. Apparently, he was going to repair the plane when he returned home.
According to Charles Hutson, Engineer of Wings Aviation, Angiel’s aircraft had some defects. The light of the undercarriage lock of the aircraft was not working; the auto pilot electrical system socket was ‘popping’; and two days prior to the crash, the right engine of the aircraft ‘popped’ when it took off from Ogle.
Angiel was expected to return after the flight to repair that flaw. According to a source, when Angiel was warned about the engine problem he brushed it off.
Hutson did not comment on if the aircraft was airworthy, but said that Angiel should have had a mechanic on board, taking into consideration the state of the aircraft and the fact that no aviation workshop in Guyana is permitted to repair an FAA-registered aircraft.