RAINBOW CITY, AL (WBRC) - A preliminary report provides new details on a fatal plane crash in Etowah County.
Tom Coble, a North Carolina businessman who was flying a training plane described as an Aero Vodochody L39C, was killed when his plane went down in a Rainbow City swamp, a short distance from the Northeast Alabama Regional Airport in Gadsden. He had just taken off the night of January 20th.
The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board reveals the plane hit some trees before it reached the ground. Multiple witnesses at the time heard explosions and saw flames.
The report reveals Coble completed a safety checklist before his flight and was in touch with the control tower at Shuttlesworth Airport in Birmingham as he took off. He was on an instrument flight plan, apparently due to inclement weather. It had been raining that evening in Gadsden.
The report says Coble was instructed on how to take off and that he repeated those instructions back to the control tower. He was cleared for takeoff and advised to switch to an advisory frequency, but controllers never heard from him again.
A witness in another plane described the airport as "below weather minimums" at the time, and saw the plane depart, then heard a loud boom.
Coble owned a business, Coble Trench Safety, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was a veteran pilot. The biography on the company website said he was the personal pilot for the late evangelist and Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell for a number of years. Coble was reportedly in Gadsden to pick up his plane, which was undergoing maintenance at the airport.
A salvage company removed the last of the wreckage the Monday following the crash. Gadsden EMA officials spent the week monitoring the creek near the crash site, due to concerns about jet fuel getting into the creek after Monday morning's heavy rains. EMA spokesperson Denise Cooey says the heavy rains likely diluted any fuel, however, and lessened the chances of a negative impact should the fuel find its way to the Coosa River.
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