Crash at Northeast Airport
kills two

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

Federal transportation officials continue to investigate the crash of a small plane that claimed the lives of a flight instructor and his student last Thursday at Northeast Philadelphia Airport.
The city medical examiner’s office has not released the names of the victims due to difficulty in formally confirming their identities. News reports identified the instructor as Adam Braddock, 28, of Fountainville, Bucks County, and the student as a 24-year-old South Philadelphia man.
Braddock was an employee of Hortman Aviation, a flight school and airplane charter, rental, sales and maintenance company based at the airport. A photo of Braddock had been removed from the company’s Web site on Friday and been replaced by the message "We will miss you."
The student was an aviation mechanic who was close to obtaining his pilot’s license, a Hortman official and family members reportedly told the news media.
A spokesman for the medical examiner, Jeff Moran, said Friday that his office expected to confirm the identities of the victims within days.
Jim Peters, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that the single-engine propeller plane crashed into the rear of the nearby T.J. Maxx distribution facility shortly after noon. Its operators lost control of the aircraft while attempting to perform a "touch-and-go" exercise on one of the airport’s runways.
A touch-and-go is when a pilot approaches the runway as if to land and touches down momentarily before immediately taking off again without coming to a stop.
Peters identified the plane as a Grumman American with the tail number N9555U. It had pilot controls at both front-seat positions.
Moments before the mishap, the plane had completed a successful touch-and-go on the airport’s runway 24, which has a southwesterly heading. Due to a shift in the wind conditions, the operators opted to repeat the exercise on runway 33, with its northwesterly heading.
According to Peters, after the airport’s control tower gave the operators radio instructions to line up their approach, the plane veered off course into the warehouse, which sits along Roosevelt Boulevard south of Red Lion Road.
A preliminary investigation into the crash is expected to take about a week, while a full investigation to determine an official cause may take six to nine months. A plane crash investigation becomes the jurisdiction of the National Transportation Safety Board whenever it involves serious injury or death, Peters said.
The plane reportedly struck a trailer parked at the rear of the warehouse and burst into flames. Philadelphia Fire Department units responded to the scene to douse the burning airplane fuel and debris. There were no injuries reported on the ground.
A Hortman Aviation official had not returned a telephone call from the Northeast Times as the paper went to press.
According to Hortman’s Web site, the company was founded in the early 1940s by former commercial airline pilot Norman Hortman. His son Herbert Hortman owns the firm and reportedly owned the 30-year-old aircraft involved in the crash.
The company’s school trains future private, commercial and corporate pilots, according to the Web site. ••
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com