Aircraft crashes in Pahrump

An aircraft categorized by the Federal Aviation Administration as a light-sport aircraft crashed at an airport in the north end of Pahrump.

The Nye County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday reported only minor injuries to the pilot, who was transported to Desert View Hospital in Pahrump.

According to a video release from the Nye County Sheriff’s Office, deputies responded to a report of an airplane crash at the Calvada Meadows Airport on the north side of Pahrump at approximately 9 a.m. on Wednesday.

Upon arrival, deputies observed a small craft that had crashed on the north end of the runway at Calvada Meadows, which sits near Highway 160 and Simkins Road.

Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the FAA, identified the aircraft as a North Wing Sport X2-N, which crashed under unknown circumstances during landing at Calvada Meadows.

Gregor said the aircraft is a weight-shift control light sport aircraft. According to the FAA website, the Light-Sport Aircraft category includes one of five classes: airplanes, gliders, powered parachutes, lighter-than-air aircraft (balloons and airships) and weight-shift control (also known as a trike).

The 61-year-old pilot, the only one on the aircraft, was from Lake Havasu, Arizona. Gregor didn’t know the extent of the pilot’s injuries.

Gregor said the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. Neither agency identifies people involved in aircraft crashes, he added.

According to the FAA’s statistics on all light-sport aircraft, there were 57 non-fatal crashes or incidents during fiscal year 2017. In that same report, the Continued Operational Safety (COS) Report for light-sport aircraft, issued in January 2018, there were seven fatal accidents in fiscal year 2017.

The number of fatal accidents was down from 10 in fiscal year 2016 and the number of non-fatal accidents/incidents was down in fiscal 2017 from fiscal year 2016’s 90 such events.

According to the report, there were 715 total fatal accidents and non-fatal accidents/incidents from July 2004 to September 2017 across all light-sport aircraft.

Of those more than 700 incidents or crashes, 62 were fatal and 653 were non-fatal.

To break that down further by class, weight-shift control aircraft constituted 15 fatal crashes or 24 percent of the total fatal crashes from the 2004 to 2017 time period, with airplanes accounting for 76 percent under the light-sport category. The other classes had no fatal crashes during that time.

The non-fatal crashes or incidents were dominated by the airplane class in the light-sport category with 610 such events. Weight-shift control had 28 such incidents during the entire reporting period in the report, which covered from July 2004 to September 2017.

Contact reporter Jeffrey Meehan at jmeehan@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @pvtimes