By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – The man killed when his small plane went down into a parking lot next to Interstate 5 in Chehalis has been positively identified as Gregory G. Graham, 66, of Centralia, the Lewis County Coroner’s Office said this evening.
Chehalis Collision Center lot
The cause of Tuesday night’s fiery crash of the single-engine plane remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board but Coroner Warren McLeod said the cause of Graham’s death is blunt force trauma to his head.
Chehalis-Centralia Airport Manager Allyn Roe said Graham was a new face at the airport, renting a hangar on Aug. 15.
He purchased a P5151 Mustang from out of the area, had it trailered in and with others had been reassembling it for the past week and half, according to Roe.
Officials said witnesses watched the plane take off and appear to become unstable before coming down inside the fenced area of a closed vehicle repair business. Nobody else was hurt, despite the surrounding area consisting of a residential neighborhood to the east and a busy retail area including Wal-Mart and K-Mart to the west.
The aircraft is classified an experimental plane, meaning it was built by an individual and not a factory. Roe described it as a three-quarter-scale replica of a popular WWII fighter plane.
Its tail number identifies it as owned by Paul Piper in Waynesfield, Ohio in the registration database of the Federal Aviation Administration, with a manufacture date of 2007.
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For background, read “Professional pilot watched small plane struggle to climb before deadly Chehalis crash” from Wednesday Aug. 27, 2014, here
Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker