Pilot dies when vintage plane crashes at Rostraver Airport

The president of the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics was killed Wednesday when the antique plane he was piloting crashed at Rostraver Airport.

The Westmoreland County Coroner's Office identified John Graham III, 42, of Jefferson Hills as the victim.

Graham was the president and CEO of the institute, a position formerly held by his father.

He was practicing “touch and go” landings in an antique airplane when a gust of wind forced him off-course at 2:26 p.m., according to the coroner's report.

He lost control and crashed the 1940s Howard aircraft in a wooded area south of the runway, where the plane immediately caught fire.

He was pronounced dead at the scene at 4:47 p.m.

Jefferson Memorial Funeral Home will be in charge of arrangements.

Gabe Monzo, executive director of the Westmoreland County Airport Authority, which manages Rostraver Airport, said the pilot was the only occupant of the plane.

Monzo said the pilot was practicing “touch and goes” and appeared to have lost control. The plane made a hard left, then went over an embankment into a wooded area near the runway.

“It's tough on the aviation community,” Monzo said.

A touch and go involves landing on a runway and taking off again without coming to a full stop, circling the airport and repeating the maneuver, allowing the pilot to practice many landings in a short time.

The plane was engulfed in flames when first responders arrived, Rostraver police Chief Greg Resetar said.

Initial calls for emergency responders were for a plane crash with heavy black smoke in the area, according to county 911 dispatchers.

John Waltrowski, a pilot and airplane mechanic from Finleyville, Washington County, said he was at his hangar when the plane went down.

Waltrowski said the antique Howard plane model, which were built in the 1930s and ‘40s, had flown out of Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin earlier Wednesday.

Owned by the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics, the single-wing aircraft had been refurbished recently, and the pilot was test-flying it, Waltrowski said.

The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. Authorities were unable to confirm the type and registration number of the plane because of fire damage, FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac said.

The FAA's database lists one Howard aircraft registered to the institute, a single-engine DGA-15P capable of carrying one pilot and up to four passengers. The database didn't list what year the plane was built, but that model was manufactured between 1939 and 1944.

A spokesman for the institute could not be reached for comment.

Monzo said about a dozen crashes have occurred at the Rostraver facility since he started working for the airport authority in 1985.

The last fatality at the airfield was in October 2014, when an ultralight helicopter flown by David Charletta, 62, of Sewickley Township crashed into a wooded ravine near the end of the runway.

The general aviation airport is off Route 51 in Rostraver Township. According to AirNav.com, 92 aircraft are based at the field, most of them single-engine planes. The facility averages 119 aircraft operations daily, 55 percent of them local planes.

Joe Napsha and Matthew Santoni are Tribune-Review staff writers.