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Authorities identified the deceased pilot of a single-engine plane that crashed into a Leon County house Wednesday night as Vermont resident Paul Valois.
His age and hometown were not available, according to a dispatcher at the Department of Public Safety office in Centerville, but authorities said he recently bought a home in the area.
Valois was the only person in the plane when it crashed. The owners of the house were in Dallas at the time, authorities said.
Leon County Sheriff’s Department officials said the plane appeared to be a small Cessna used for recreational use, but investigators haven’t yet confirmed that.
“There wasn’t enough [of the plane] left when we got there,” he said.
Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board arrived on the scene Thursday morning to begin investigating the wreckage.
The crash occurred at a house in the Hilltop Lakes community northwest of Normangee. The private housing development has its own small runway for retired pilots and recreational flyers, Wakefield said.
He said the 5,000-foot runway’s lights are designed to be turned on remotely by incoming pilots, but they were damaged by a recent storm.
As Valois approached, he contacted a friend to turn the lights on manually, Wakefield said. He planned on circling the runway a few times while he waited, the sheriff said.
“The pilot misjudged his altitude and clipped a pine tree over the row of houses and it disabled the plane,” Wakefield said. “He crashed into a yard next door and clipped trees and then went directly into the middle of the house.”
He said the brick house was completely destroyed. Volunteer firefighters from five departments — Hilltop Lakes, Normangee, Flynn, Marquez and Centerville — responded to the scene and took more than four hours to contain the fire, authorities said.
No other homes were damaged, authorities said.
