Bad new at GTU

We had a crash at GTU, Georgetown, TX yesterday. A Cessna 182
with 4 men on board crashed on takeoff off runway 11. The aircraft
crashed just outside the airport boundary into a field with small oak,
scrub and grass. It burned on impact. You certainly can't put much
stock in the new reports, but the local news outlets reported witnesses
hearing a "sputting" engine as the airplane went down. They also reported
that the pilot and one other man died and the two others were burned
and transported to burn centers. They were headed to Colorado for
a ski trip. The aircraft was Mexican registration based based at GTU
and hangared in the same hangar where I kept my Aztec.

I had just landed with a student and pulled up to the gas pumps to refuel.
The C182 was sitting in front of the terminal building with a group of
people,
apparently wives and children, saying goodbye and waiting for it to depart.
It taxied out about the same time we finished refueling. We taxied back to
our
hangar and when I got out of the airplane I noticed a big cloud of very
black smoke rising from the south end of the field. I told my student that
didn't
look good, and in very short order, sirens were heard. I grapped the
handheld radio
to listen to CTAF and in a couple of minutes the UNICOM operator broadcasted
and advisory to aircraft in bound to GTU that an aircraft had crashed just
off the
departure end of runway 11.

In any event, it was a sobering event to realize that I had watched the last
few minutes of these guys's life as they prepared to depart, not knowing
that they only had a few minutes to live. Worse yet, was knowing that
family member witnessed the accident.

Ronnie