Plane Wreckage Recovered

What remained of the this past Sunday was recovered by salvage crews in Dennis, according to a report in the Cape Cod Times.

Oulton Hues, 73, of Edgartown and Norwood, and Robert Walker, 68, of East Falmouth took off from Martha's Vineyard Airport this past Sunday in Walker’s Piper Comanche. Walker, an experienced pilot, was training with flight instructor Hues for another level of pilot certification. The plane went down around 10:30 am and the bodies of both men were recovered some four hours later near Saint's Landing in Brewster.

The search for the plane itself has been ongoing since Sunday. Yesterday, the Times reports, "State police divers, marina employees, Dennis fire and Brewster Natural Resources personnel, along with a salvage crew from Winkler Crane labored most of the day to lift the wreckage off the bottom of Cape Cod Bay. What they returned with was hardly recognizable as a plane, a cubist approximation of tail, wings and fuselage crumpled like an accordion, twisted into a box shape.

It seemed apparent from the wreckage and from remarks of inspectors and others at the scene that the plane was not making an attempted landing when it crashed into the waters off Brewster's Mant's Landing Sunday morning but hit the shallow, low-tide water nose first, plowing into the sandy bottom a few feet below."

Federal Aviation Administration and state police inspectors were on hand to take pictures and discuss events in order to piece together what might have gone wrong. A spokesman for the FAA reportedly said the National Transportation and Safety Board would have a preliminary report ready sometime next week.