A man has died in a light plane crash in fields at Yeelanna, in South Australia’s Lower Eyre Peninsula region.<\/p>\n
SA Police said the pilot and sole occupant of the plane, a 36-year-old Port Lincoln man, died at the scene.<\/p>\n
Reports of the crash at Yeelanna, about 15 kilometres north of Cummins and about 80 kilometres north of Port Lincoln along the Tod Highway, first emerged about 1:30pm.<\/p>\n
Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) chief commissioner Angus Mitchell earlier told ABC SA’s Regional Drive program that the crash involved a single-seat Air Tractor agricultural aircraft that was understood to have been spraying crops.<\/p>\n
He said authorities were alerted to the incident when a “locator beacon” on the aircraft was activated.<\/p>\n
“The exact method of activation in this case, we are not sure of, but we do know that then goes off and it’s picked up, generally by the Rescue Coordination Centre in Canberra \u2026 and then they make emergency services notifications as necessary,” he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Angus Mitchell says authorities were alerted to the incident when a locator beacon was activated. (ABC News)<\/p>\n
He said a team of ATSB safety investigators from Melbourne and Canberra, specialising in aircraft operations and engineering, were expected to arrive at the scene early on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
In a separate statement, the ATSB, which conducts “no blame” investigations to help prevent future incidents, said the investigators would inspect the site and wreckage and also recover any aircraft parts for further examination at their facilities in Canberra.<\/p>\n
“Investigators will also seek to interview relevant parties, and collect any recorded information including available flight tracking data, as well as pilot and aircraft maintenance records, and weather information,” the statement said.<\/p>\n
SA Police major crash investigators are expected to arrive on scene late on Monday. A report will be prepared for the coroner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man has died in a light plane crash in fields at Yeelanna, in South Australia’s Lower Eyre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,17724,13748,89345,44,1155,57805,44167],"class_list":["post-127820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-emergency-services","tag-eyre-peninsula","tag-light-plane","tag-news","tag-plane","tag-plane-crash","tag-scene"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}