Two killed in Atlanta plane crash

A father and son were killed last week when their private plane crashed while attempting to land at the Atlanta airfield.

Killed in the Thursday afternoon crash were Kim Peterson, the pilot, and his father, George S. Peterson, both of Spanish Fork, Utah.

The elder Peterson died at the scene. His son died Friday at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center from injuries sustained in the accident.

Sheriff's Department detective Captain Mike Barclay said the pair had been flying in the mountains, having visited the Pine airfield earlier in their visit to the area, and were attempting to land at the unimproved airfield just outside of Atlanta, when the accident occured at about 1:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon.

Witnesses told authorities that the plane had come in too fast and hot on its first effort to land, aborted the landing, circled, and tried again.

The second approach was too far into the airstrip as well and it appeared the pilot was attempting to abort his second landing attempt. Instead, however, as the pilot pulled power to gain altitude for another attempt, his wing clipped a tree at the end of the runway and nosed into the ground.

Atlanta volunteer fire department crews quickly arrived to prevent any fires, and worked, along with LifeFlight crews, to extricate the younger Peterson, who had survived the crash to that point. He was taken by air ambulance to St. Alphonsus where he died the next day from his injuries.

With the James Creek summit road closed at that time, Elmore County Sheriff's Department detectives responding to the scene were forced to go through Boise to reach the scene, arriving about four hours after the crash to find the body of the elder Peterson, who had died at the scene, still in the plane's wreckage.

The constricted Atlanta airfield, with a small mountain at the north end of the runway where the crash occured, is considered to be an extremely difficult runway to land at, Barclay noted. There have been several crashes there in recent years.

The Peterson crash, in fact, occured at a GPS coordinate, according to the National Transportation and Safety Board, that was almost identical to the last fatal crash that occured in Atlanta, Barclay said. It was the third plane crash at the airfield in the last two years.