Updated ,first published
A pilot of almost 50 years has been identified as one of the men killed when a light plane crashed just after take-off south of Brisbane, igniting a large blaze that took hours to control.
Emergency services were called before 6am on Tuesday to reports an aircraft had crash-landed and skidded off the end of the runway at Heck Field, an airstrip within the Gold Coast Sport Flying Club at Jacobs Well.
Pilot Greg Ackman, 73, from Beenleigh, and his passenger, from Sydney, were pulled from the plane, with ambulance, police and fire crews attending the scene about 55 kilometres south of Brisbane.
A friend of Ackman told Nine News Queensland he had flown since he was a teenager and owned several aircraft – all with a distinctive red nose.
Police Superintendent Brett Jackson said CCTV vision of the crash taken at the airstrip would form part of the investigation.
He said Heck Field was a private airfield where people rented hangars and conducted private flights.
A flight plan lodged with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority indicated the plane was headed to a town near Tamworth in north-east NSW.
Fire crews said the plane came to rest in bushland off the end of the runway, and a plume of smoke was seen rising from the aircraft.
Cane fields and grasslands caught fire and Ackman and his passenger were trapped in the cockpit.
Several fire crews fought the blaze alongside SES personnel, with a total of about 50 officers. The fire was contained by 4.45pm, and emergency crews were still monitoring the scene and conducting backburns at 7.30pm – about 14 hours after the crash.
“We’re surrounded by cane paddocks and small shrubbery. The ground here is quite wet and muddy, and then we also have an estuary in that vicinity,” Jackson said.
Joel Gordon, assistant chief officer at the fire department, noted some flames reached six metres.
“Conditions are not great for suppressing fires today, and we’re seeing that in the fire behaviour over the past couple of hours,” he said.
Smoke from the fire affected people in the area, including schools.
A 100-metre-wide wall of fire burning to the north – inaccessible because of the wet terrain – had been fanned by winds up to 30km/h.
The Gold Coast Sport Flying Club is on Stapylton Jacobs Well Road at the site of a former cane field that was converted to a runway in the late 1980s.
The airfield had been a filming location for several movies, including San Andreas and Dora and the Lost City of Gold.
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