Plane crash into house outside Richmond update

By MARK BOWES
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
Published: April 30, 2008

A single-engine airplane that crashed in a Chesterfield County neighborhood on Sunday slammed to the ground before sliding about 20 feet into a home and bursting into flames, a federal official said today.

For reasons still being investigated, the Mooney M20M aircraft plunged downward after taking off from the Chesterfield County Airport about 10:16 a.m. and climbing to 1,800 feet, said Keith Holloway, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington.

“It [then] impacted the ground and hit the house, which fragmented the airplane,” Holloway said.

The pilot, Joseph Anthony Grana Jr., 40, of Florham Park, N.J., and his father, Joseph Anthony Grana Sr., 73, of Richmond, died on impact.

The crash and resulting fireball critically injured Melissa Bowen, 22, who was staying temporarily at her sister’s home in the 3100 block of Windsong Drive when the plane hit. The sister was not at home at the time. Bowen suffered burns over 56 percent of her body and remains in critical but stable condition at VCU Medical Center in Richmond.

A recovery fund was established yesterday in her name. Donations can be made to the Melissa M. Bowen Recovery Fund, c/o People’s Bank of Virginia, PO Box 71960, Richmond, Va., 23255. Contributions can be mailed or made directly at any of the bank’s four area branches, according to Theresa Sharry, the bank’s Midlothian branch manager.

The funds will be used to pay for Melissa’s medical bills and other needs.

Authorities late yesterday finished removing aircraft debris from the crash site and from several neighborhood yards. Because some parts of the plane were found some distance from the crash, investigators are looking into the possibility that the plane broke apart—or that some parts fell from the aircraft—before impact, Holloway said.

“That’s something we’re looking into,” he said. “We’re interviewing witnesses as well.”

He said the next step is to reconstruct as much of the plane as possible from the collected debris.

“It may not be the reconstruction that you think, as far as piecing each part of the plane together,” he said. “But more so laying it all out as if it were an aircraft.”

Grana and his father, who according to Federal Aviation Administration records had at one time been a commercial pilot, were en route to Franklin Municipal Airport in southeastern Virginia when the plane went down.

The younger Grana had traveled here Friday for a family event in Richmond after departing from an airport in Essex County, N.J. Family members said Grana Jr. was an experienced pilot and federal records show that he was he was qualified to fly under instrument rules.