Another Indian pilot student die in US crash

A white shirt floating among twisted pieces of plane debris Monday led investigators to the body of a Pennsylvania pilot killed in a midair collision over a remote section of the Everglades.
Divers searching in a “crater” nearby pulled the body of Harry Duckworth, 56, of Waverly, Pa., from the murky water. The body was about 100 feet from one of the plane engines, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Paul Miller said. They found credit cards and identification in his name with the body, Miller said.
Searchers also found attached to one of the planes some remains they think belong to the second pilot killed in the weekend crash, Miller said. That man was identified Monday as Cleon Alvares, 25, of Mumbai, India, by Jeff Rozelle, owner of Lantana-based Kemper Aviation where Alvares was a student.
(This is the second crash in two months involving Kemper Aviation. On October 26, the flying school’s plane went down at Boynton Beach, Florida, US, killing an Indian student and a Sweedish flight instructor and injuring another Indian student. See the reports here and here and here.
– EDITOR, AvIndia).
Alvares was flying a company-owned Cessna 152 through an “alert area” where pilots practice maneuvers when the two planes collided about 3 p.m. Saturday.
The wreckage of the Cessna and Duckworth’s Piper Twin Comanche rained down over a half-mile swath of swamp about a mile west of the end of Lox Road, near the Palm Beach County-Broward County line.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel received an e-mail from Neil Alvares, who identified himself as the student pilot’s cousin.
“His parents are in shock and we have to yet get a confirmation from official sources,” he wrote. “We are praying fervently that he survives because he had just come to the U.S. for the pilot training course and he is very young and the only son of my uncle.”
Alvares had logged more than 100 flight hours since he came to the United States in July, according to Rozelle, the owner of the Lantana flight school where the Cessna was based.
“He was a very popular and well-liked student,” he wrote in a statement released Monday. “He studied hard, and took his career in aviation very seriously. He will be dearly missed.”
Miller said the Sheriff’s Office hoped to positively identify the remains believed to be Alvares through DNA tests.
Recovery crews and an investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board plan to return to the site today to continue the search for Alvares’ body and recovery of remaining pieces of the two aircrafts.
Although the crews had recovered about 80 percent of the wreckage Monday, what caused the two airplanes to collide was still a mystery.
11/12/07 Chrystian Tejedor/ South Florida Sun-Sentinel, US