Bizarre Coincidence With Fatal Consequences When FAA and NTSB Pilots Collide

In a bizarre, seemingly-fictional event, two planes owned by employees of US aviation safety organizations, crashed yesterday afternoon following a mid-air collision in rural Virginia. 

Television news video from the scene where Proven's plane landed.

Thomas Proven, an investigator with the Federal Aviation Administration's office of accident investigations and James Duncan, a physician specializing in aerospace medicine and employed by the National Transportation Safety Board, collided about five miles out of a general aviation airport in Virginia.

Proven, 70, flying his 1965 Piper, was injured in the accident, Duncan and an as-yet-unidentified second person were killed.

A spokeswoman for the FAA said Proven was on approach to Warrenton-Fauquier Airport sixty miles west of Washington, DC. Eyewitnesses say Proven seemed to glide the Piper down into a clearing on private property after the two planes hit.  Proven was bleeding, but told Robert Taylor who owns the property on which the plane landed, that he wanted to call his wife.  Duncan's six-seat 1979 Beechcraft Bonanza caught fire when it hit the ground.

Today, Deborah Hersman, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Canadian investigators will conduct the probe into what happened.

“This accident hits especially close to home, with the involvement of an NTSB employee,” she said in a statement. Canada's Transportation Safety Board agreed to handle the case.