Man flies plane into his home hours after fight with wife
A man has flown a plane into his own house just hours after he had been arrested for allegedly assaulting his wife.
Duane Youd and his wife had been drinking when they made their way up to American Fork Canyon in Payson, Utah to talk through their problems.
Witnesses called police about 7.30pm Sunday to report he was assaulting his wife. He was booked on suspicion of domestic violence and posted bail.
The 47-year-old requested an officer escort him to his home so he could get his truck and some belongings around midnight.
Within hours, the qualified pilot was taking off in the plane from the Spanish Fork-Springville Airport about 25 kilometres north of his house.
He flew directly to his neighbourhood and smashed the twin-engine Cessna 525 directly into his two-storey house, authorities said.
Youd died in the crash, however his wife and child survived.
Photos of the wreckage showed the white plane charred and in pieces in the front yard near an overturned and crushed car. Most of the house was still intact, but heavily burned in the front.
Payson police Sergeant Noemi Sandoval said the plane barely missed power lines and other homes.
Online court records show that Youd agreed last month to attend marriage and family counselling sessions for six months as part of a plea agreement following an April 8 domestic violence incident in which he was charged with disorderly conduct.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.
Major review after Seattle plane theft
It is the second bizarre airplane incident in recent days. On Friday an employee stole a turboprop plane from Sea-Tac International Airport in Seattle and flew it for more than an hour before dying in a crash on an island southwest of Tacoma.
Investigators are continuing to piece together how 3½-year Horizon Air employee Richard Russell stole the empty Bombardier Q400 turboprop on Friday evening and took off on a roughly 75-minute flight, executing steep banks and even a barrel roll while being tailed by fighter jets. He finally crashed into a forested island south of Seattle.
“This is too big a deal. It’s not going to go away,” said Glen Winn, a former Secret Service agent who teaches in the University of Southern California’s aviation security program.
“There’s going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of meetings, a lot of finger-pointing, and it’s going to come down to: How do we stop it?”
Russell was killed. No one else was hurt. In a conversation with an air-traffic controller, he described himself as “just a broken guy,” said he “wasn’t really planning on landing” the aircraft, and claimed he didn’t want to hurt anyone else.
