A flight instructor and her student — a father-to-be and US Navy officer — are presumed dead after their plane plummeted into a New Orleans lake, according to authorities and reports.
Taylor Dickey, 30, and her student, later identified as 30-year-old Navy Lt. David Michael Jahn, took off from Gulfport–Biloxi International Airport in a Cessna Skyhawk on Monday, the Coast Guard told WWL 4.
The plane vanished from the flight radar at roughly 6:30 p.m., four miles north of New Orleans Lakefront Airport, the outlet said.
There was no distress call from the aircraft, and it is not immediately clear who was in the pilot’s seat when the plane crashed into Lake Pontchartrain, Michael Carastro, the owner of the flight school that owned the plane, said in a press conference on Tuesday.
The impact of the plane into the lake was “very, very violent,” Carastro added.
An hour after it vanished, search teams saw discoloration in the water, and Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries personnel recovered a seat cushion and other debris likely from the aircraft, the Coast Guard told the outlet.
The search continued for nearly two days before it was suspended on Wednesday afternoon, according to Nola.com
Jahn and Dickey were both presumed dead after the crash, Carastro said.
“Nobody knows what happened at this point. The initial, the preliminary data, indicates that it was not mechanical, so we are going to wait on the official agencies that are investigating the operation. I’m not gonna make any suppositions on how it happened,” he added.
Dickey was a “highly qualified” pilot, and the aircraft that plunged into the lake was well maintained, Carastro continued.
“It was an unbelievable tragedy,” he told reporters.
“I’ve been instructing for 46 years. I’ve never, never, had this. It’s my first. So it’s hitting me pretty hard, as well as the rest of the employees here at Apollo and Million Air, because both individuals were very well-liked. And so we’re devastated,” he said.
Jahn was identified by the US Navy as a civil engineer corps officer serving with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 1 in Gulfport and a father-to-be, Nola.com reported.
He was in the midst of training for his commercial pilot’s license and was just short of the required 250 flight hours, Carastro said.
