BUFORD, Ga. — Last January, a plane had to make an emergency landing on Interstate 985 in Gwinnett County.
More than a year later, the National Transportation Safety Board released its final report on the crash, saying that contamination of the fuel system caused a total loss of engine power and forced an emergency landing.
As previously reported by Channel 2 Action News, during the emergency landing, the single-engine plane ended up hitting a semi-truck.
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After the landing and crash, the Piper PA-28 sat in the northbound lanes of I-985 for hours. Despite the crash, the pilot of the plane and passenger walked away uninjured.
Now, the NTSB report says the issue that caused the crash is one that’s been the subject of a Channel 2 Action News investigation.
In 2022, Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray began looking into a problem that’s been happening for decades: small planes falling out of the sky after an engine suddenly shuts down mid-flight.
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As reported during the Channel 2 Action News investigation, critics of federal regulators said it was a design flaw found in thousands of planes, particularly popular single-engine planes.
A pilot named Luis Leon previously spoke with Gray, saying the NTSB had found him at fault for not ensuring water was not in his fuel tanks, but when Gray dug through decades of NTSB reports, he found more than 150 accidents where water was found in the fuel.
Leon was not alone. Gray dug deeper and learned that even the Federal Aviation Administration had reported that despite efforts as far as shaking plane wings to check fuel in the wing’s engines, sometimes as much as 13 ounces of water were still inside the fuel tanks.
Back in February 2022, Channel 2 Action News learned more than 300 Cessna plane crashes had been due to water contamination, going all the way back to 1982.
While the Piper is a different type of plane, Gray’s investigation showed that thousands of planes had the same issue of water getting into the fuel line, causing planes to make emergency landings, and sometimes crash.
The NTSB report on the Buford plane crash said issues didn’t begin during the flight until the student pilot “switched fuel tanks.” That’s when the engine “unexpectedly lost all power.”
The flight instructor confirmed to the NTSB that preflight checks had not had any observed water. The NTSB reported that “based on this information, it is likely that, as the student switched fuel tanks, previously undetected water from within the fuel system was introduced to the carburetor, resulting in the total loss of power.”
Examination of the plane during the FAA investigation after the crash found that the “carburetor bowl contained blue fuel and about one ounce of cloudy water,” which was discovered during partial disassembly. The carburetor was removed by investigators for examination during this process.
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