When a flight simulator gets realz.
The King Air was destroyed, and its sole occupant - the pilot - was fatally injured. Also killed were three of the building's occupants who were in a flight simulator. Needless to say, the flight simulator got pretty real that day and it was totally destroyed as well. (Remarkably, one of the simulator occupants survived.)
In interviews with the NTSB air traffic controllers stated that the accident flight had been cleared for takeoff on runway 1R and was instructed to fly the runway heading. After becoming airborne, the pilot declared an emergency and stated that the airplane "lost the left engine." The plane then entered a shallow left turn, continued turning left, and then descended into the FlightSafety building. An air traffic controller called aircraft rescue and firefighting just before impact. The controllers observed flames and then black smoke coming from the accident site. (The accident pilot who had been hired for the ferry flight, Mark Goldstein, was himself a retired air traffic controller.) Witnesses in the Cessna Service Center building on the east side of runway 1R also observed the airplane departing runway 1R. They indicated that the airplane then porpoised several times before making a left turn. The airplane continued the left turn, barely cleared the top of a hangar on the west side of runway 1R, and then descended into a building. The witnesses reported that the landing gear was extended and that they could not clearly hear the sound of the engines. Excerpts of relevant ATC audio are included in this video.
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