Female Pilot, 30, and Her Flight Student Presumed Dead After Plane Crashes into Lake: ‘Unbelievable Tragedy’

A 30-year-old flight instructor and her adult student are presumed dead after their small plane went down over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana.

Taylor Dickey, 30, and an unnamed adult student departed from Gulfport–Biloxi International Airport on Monday, Nov. 24, according to WWL 4, WBRZ 2 and the Daily Mail. About an hour into the flight, their single-engine aircraft vanished from radar while flying over Lake Pontchartrain, per the Coast Guard, as reported by WWL 4 and the Daily Mail.

Wreckage from the missing plane was later located using “specialized sonar, dive operations and K9 search,” according to a Nov. 30 Facebook update from the United Cajun Navy, a local nonprofit assisting in the search.

At a press conference on Nov. 25, Michael Carastro, owner of the flight school that operated the aircraft, said both people on board are now “presumed dead.”

“Nobody knows what happened at this point. The initial — the preliminary data — indicates that it was not mechanical, so we are going to wait on the official agencies that are investigating the operation. I’m not gonna make any suppositions on how it happened,” he said.

Carastro described Dickey as an experienced and ambitious pilot.

“The instructor was highly qualified. She had been coming up on about 12 or 13 hundred hours [of flying], which makes her about 200 hours short of meeting her requirements for the airlines, which was her ultimate goal. The other [student] had the same aspirations,” he explained.

He also noted that there was no distress call from the plane at the time of the incident.

“It was an unbelievable tragedy,” Carastro said. “I’ve been instructing for 46 years. I’ve never — never — had this. It’s my first. So it’s hitting me pretty hard, as well as the rest of the employees here at Apollo and Million Air, because both individuals were very well-liked. And so we’re devastated.”

Sharing that Dickey’s father is also a pilot, Carastro added that her family is currently “in shock.”

In the wake of the tragedy, a Change.org petition has been launched urging the Gulfport-Biloxi Airport Authority to add “Taylor Dickey Field” to the official name of the airport.

“Through her instructional role and her community advocacy, Taylor became a well-known figure at the airport and among flight training stakeholders in the Gulf Coast region. Her loss has deeply affected students, colleagues, airfield personnel and aviation partners,” the petition reads.

“Designating the airfield as ‘Taylor Dickey Field’ would stand as a lasting testament to her contributions and her embodiment of the spirit of aviation,” it continues.