Melanie Georger, Tonawanda, N.Y pilot crashes single engine plane moments after her last skydiver passengers jump out over Niagara Falls as an investigation into plane crash is made.
What went wrong? A 26 year old female pilot ‘living her dream’, died moments after her skydiving passengers jumped from her aircraft near Niagara Falls over the weekend.
Melanie Georger, 26, was the only person on board when the single-engine Cessna she was commanding, crashed Saturday, the Niagara Country Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Georger, of Tonawanda, New York, was working to become a commercial pilot, her dad posted in a statement on Facebook.
‘My beloved daughter, my best friend and one of the two lights of my life passed away suddenly today,’ Paul Georger wrote. ‘Melanie was a pilot, on the cusp of realizing her dream to fly for the airlines. She was doing what she loved, flying for a local skydiving company, when her plane crashed.’
‘Why didn’t it crash with us on it?’
According to a Facebook post from Eagle East Aviation, Georger earned her private pilot certificate in July 2021 and had taken off Saturday morning with her crew of skydiver passengers.
The skydiving company, ‘Skydive the Falls,’ to date has declined to comment on the plane crash. The company which opened in 2019, advertises a scenic flyover of Niagara Falls before each skydive.
Georger was the only person onboard during the crash and was ‘heading back to land,’ according to officials.
One of the skydivers on a flight with Georger right before the one that crashed said he felt blessed to be alive and lamented that her life was cut short.
‘For some reason God left me on Earth and I’m just blessed to still be around,’ Walker told WIVB-TV. ‘It’s just an eerie feeling that I was on that plane literally a half hour before it crashed. Why didn’t it crash with us on it? Why didn’t it crash with more people on it? It’s surreal.’
He said was unconcerned by the pilot’s youth, and that she checked in with him personally and shared encouraging words about his tandem skydiving partner, boosting his confidence before he jumped.
Catastrophe averted
‘I give her props for wanting to do what she was doing,’ he said. “I really feel bad for the business and the company she was working for, because they’re a great company. I thought she did a great job training.
‘It’s not like skydiving planes once a week fall out of the sky and you just kind of dodge it. This is a fluke accident. Something went wrong.’
The tragedy has left him shaken that he could have been minutes away from dying if he had decided not to jump.
‘For some reason God left me on Earth and I’m just blessed to still be around,’ Walker told WIVB.
Niagara County Sheriff Michael Filicetti said if the plane crashed just a couple hundred feet away from where it did, it could’ve been a lot worse, WIVB-TV reported.
‘Where it landed was just off the parkway. We look to the west near Fort Niagara, it’s full of soccer players today,’ Filicetti said. ‘We’re lucky where it landed, but it is an unfortunate incident.’
What went wrong?
Not immediately clear is what led to the aircraft crashing, whether the result of pilot error or possible plane malfunction. The weather that day was clear visibility amid the summer months with calm winds.
Georger, a former system engineer for Raytheon, received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the University of Buffalo in 2020, according to her LinkedIn.
She also received a certificate from the Georgia Institute of Technology for fundamentals of flight test and evaluation.
The young aviator was licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a commercial pilot for single-engine and multi-engine planes and was a certified flight instructor.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the airplane was a single-engine Cessna 208B. It crashed near a road in Youngstown, fewer than 15 miles from Niagara Falls. The National Transportation Safety Board will lead the investigation into the crash.
