Indian student's death: Tower warned the other pilot of approaching plane

Fifty-five seconds to disaster, the voice of a busy Miami air traffic controller crackled over the radio in Harry Duckworth III’s twin-engine Piper. “Traffic 11 o’clock, 2 miles southbound, altitude indicates two thousand two hundred.”
The veteran pilot scanned the horizon for the oncoming plane. It was about 3 p.m. on Dec. 8, and scattered clouds hung in the sky about 2,300 feet over the Everglades west of Boca Raton. This was the final leg of Duckworth’s trip from Ocala to Pompano Beach, where a childhood friend was waiting, and the controller’s warning had come at an especially busy time for the pilot, who was making ready to land.
“Six Charlie Charlie,” Duckworth said into the radio, identifying himself to the control tower. “Searchin’ for traffic.” It was to be his last transmission, according to a preliminary report released Friday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
As the final seconds of Duckworth’s life ticked away, the Miami controller radioed two other planes before the images on his radar screen made him call Duckworth once more.
“Six Charlie Charlie, that traffic’s passing left to right, two thousand two hundred Ö” “Immediately thereafter,” the investigator’s report continues, “there was an unintelligible transmission on the frequency that was cut off.” Duckworth might never have seen the single-engine Cessna, piloted by a flight student who wasn’t communicating with the control tower.
The planes collided at about 2,000 feet, raining wreckage over several acres of marsh. Duckworth and the other pilot, 25-year-old Cleon Alvares, who had come here from Mumbai, India, to learn to fly, were killed.
Alvares was a student at Kemper Aviation, a Lantana-based flight school that recruits heavily in India. He had more than 100 hours of flight time, said Jeff Rozelle, the flight school’s owner, in a statement after the crash.
Duckworth, 56, had been a pilot for more than 30 years, his family said. His grandfather flew combat flights in World War I. His father flew commercially for decades.
Recovery teams spent the next few days pulling jagged pieces of the planes from the muck before NTSB air safety investigator Paul Cox pored over the wreckage. Cox’s report noted that while Duckworth was flying by instrument flight rules, which required him to check with the tower before changing altitude or heading, Alvares was flying by visual flight rules and wasn’t required to communicate with controllers at all.
It’s possible each pilot, moving through a congested zone frequented by student pilots, never saw the other coming.
Alvares was the third Kemper Aviation pilot to die in a plane crash since October, when a single-engine Piper flown by another Indian trainee and a veteran flight instructor crashed into a golf course west of Boynton Beach. Both pilots were killed and a third student, also from India, was critically injured in that crash.
28/12/07 Michael LaForgia/Palm Beach Post, United States