The pilot of a small plane that crashed in Bowie, Maryland, Saturday night, had received his private pilot certification less than three weeks before the deadly crash, records show.
News4 confirmed through online FAA records that 26-year-old Yoav Bomrind, of Israel, got his certification on June 3.
Bomrind died in the crash, alongside two passengers, 19-year-old David Rabinovitz, of Israel, and 20-year-old Elad Naidik, of Canada, Maryland State Police said.
“What I would be asking right now is: Did this private pilot who was certificated, did he allow one of these other pilots, even though they shouldn’t be flying, did he allow one of them to fly?” said Gregory Feith, a pilot and former senior investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.
The NTSB has not said who was flying the plane when it went down, and the cause of the crash could take more than a year to determine.
The men were headed from Ocean City, New Jersey, to the Montgomery County Air Park in Gaithersburg, state police said.
Feith, who said his home airport was the Montgomery County Air Park, offered some insight into the moments leading up to the crash.
“The flight path was not a straight line. Typically, when you get to cruise altitude and you’re going point A to point B, you’re pretty much going in a straight line,” he said. “Looking at the data that I saw – this airplane was not only up and down quite a bit in altitude, but it was also very left and very right of a straight line course back to Gaithersburg.”
All of that movement requires more power, which requires more fuel.
“Were they able to get gas or were they trying to come back on the fuel that they had already had from Gaithersburg?” Feith said. “There was no evidence of fire, which would suggest that there wasn’t a lot of fuel onboard the aircraft.”
The plane also crashed at night, which is a much tougher environment to fly in, according to Feith.
The NTSB will look at recordings of air traffic control communications, radar data, weather reports, what the pilot did in the 72 hours before the crash as well as aircraft maintenance records.
The plane that crashed belonged to the Washington International Flight Academy in Gaithersburg. News4 has reached out to the flight academy repeatedly for comment, but we have not heard back.
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