Crash Landing Plane Kills iPod Jogger

Nicole Martinelli ()

Crash Landing Plane Kills iPod Jogger

Pilot Edward Smith, second right, pilot of a small plane that crashed Monday evening on Hilton Head Island, SC. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum)

Robert Gary Jones was enjoying a jog along on the beach with his iPod when a single-engine plane making an emergency landing hit him from behind, killing him instantly.

The 38-year-old father of two was on a business trip in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina when a Lancair IV-P aircraft lost its propeller and was “basically gliding” Monday evening before hitting Jones, coroner Ed Allen told AP.

“There’s no noise,” said aviation expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the National Transportation Safety Board. “So the jogger, with his ear buds in, and the plane without an engine, you’re basically a stealth aircraft. Who would expect to look up?”

Pilot Edward I. Smith and his passenger walked away from the crash landing near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa.

According to the Lancair web site, the airplane model that killed Jones is a four-seater that can reach speeds of up to 345 mph and is sold in kit that can “be easily built in one’s home shop,” with a final price tag estimated at $320,000 – $470,000.

Jones’ death is uncommon, but not unheard of: last year a Philadelphia jogger using an iPod died when a tree fell on her.

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Hard to say whether volume control might have saved him, but it’s worth thinking about.

Via AP

22 comments »

About the author

nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

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Posted in iPod, News |

  • Helius

    Amateur pilots – Menaces. They’re always crashing into stuff. It’s surely time to only allow commercial pilots to fly planes?

  • http://iphoneglance.com kris

    things like this happen all over, i was driving last year and i accidentally ran over a woman’s foot when she cross the road without looking, and she had her ipod headphones on full volume. very unfortunate i was lucky not to get sued.

  • Joseph

    WTF, gliding or not, why the hell couldn’t the pilot have landed in the water where there were no people? Hope the family sues.

  • http://www.twitter.com/j_holtslander Jay

    Personally I think this must be Nike’s fault.
    72.8% of people who die while jogging are using Nike runners at the time.

  • Jrdpa

    What an insensitive article. Someone lost a family member to a freak accident and you’re making comments about volume control?

  • Jeremy

    How exactly would volume control have prevented this? That’s like saying that someone could have avoided a car accident by not wearing a fuzzy sweater… there’s no correlation between the two. The plane was silent, so even if he had no earbuds, he’d still have been killed. What would have saved the jogger was the pilot steering his plane a different direction.

  • alsoApilot

    Lots of editorial comments without knowing the full story.. ditching in the water vs. smooth beach? Beach is a better option and the pilot had his passengers safety to contend with as well. This pilot had no propulsion, so setup for a landing and had to commit to it. How far did he go before stopping? Looks like it was a gear up landing, so might have slid quite a bit. Could be that jogger was not anywhere near where the pilot anticipated. “The Lancair IV-P aircraft had lost its propeller, with oil smeared all over its windshield, making visibility difficult, authorities said.” So visibility was an issue as well. If he’d ditched in the water and took out a group of swimmers/surfers/kayakers/etc – or if he’d lost his passenger – people would be commenting on why he passed up a clean, safe, sparsely populated beach.

    Definitely tragic for the jogger – obviously an innocent. Listening to music at any volume while running on the beach is not cause to assume responsibility of such an event. Kind of stupid comment by author – technology hook/space filler – to comment on volume control.

  • V

    Try to make news about Apple instead.
    Reporting deaths because “the guy was wearing an ipod/phone omg” is kind of a new low in terms any kind of professional integrity. Make fillers without exploiting other people’s death, or I’ll just find another news website.

  • Don Pope

    I have to agree with “V”. This kind of news doesn’t belong here.

  • OlsonBW

    “Hard to say whether volume control might have saved him, but it’s worth thinking about.”

    No it’s #$*&#*$&#$ not! The plane was making NO NOISE because the engine was not on and it was gliding. Guess what, this happens to people without iPods too.

  • TLB

    anything mooving throu air makes a nois without the ipod he might have herd something and looked wher it was comeing from

  • Ryan

    “Hard to say whether volume control might have saved him, but it’s worth thinking about.”

    No, it’s not. This was a stupid thing to say, not hard to say, nor is it worth thinking about. I hate to jump on the poster, but this is crap.

  • Tony

    “There’s no noise,” said aviation expert Mary Schiavo

    “Hard to say whether volume control might have saved him, but it’s worth thinking about.”

    Volume control where? On the aircraft?

  • Reed Richards

    The site’s called “cult of mac” so yeah, anything that has to do with Apple is pretty much fair game…

    Also, it would’ve been better without the throwaway comment at the end, but yeah, it’s fair game to wonder whether even though the plane was “silent” whether the guy might have heard something and avoided this horrible death…

  • PG

    I think the point of the story is quite clear: iPods are the leading cause of death for joggers on beaches where silent planes crash.

    Scientifically, the mechanism is probably similar to the one that causes tornados to be attracted to trailer parks, or the fact that most people who die in car crashes have eaten bread some time in the week leading up to the event.

  • Nathan

    I understand that it was an emergency landing, but SERIOUSLY, you couldn’t avoid hitting and killing someone?! What a f*ckhole.

  • Bonk

    Really groping to crank out the articles, aren’t we?

  • imajoebob

    Lots of reasonable arguments here, but to me it looks like a pilot who had to choose between making a dangerous landing more risky for himself and his passenger or make it more risky for an innocent bystander.

    But I don’t know the full detail. Was he heading for the water and came up short or did he decide the beach was safer for him and his passenger? Could he have nosed in early and risk catastrophic injury, or are there obstructions to the left of the photo? Could he have cut sharply left or right, probably pinwheeling, but perhaps spreading deadly debris flying at 50 miles an hour in every direction? And most importantly, could he even see the jogger on the beach, or was he in a blind spot?

    And after some consideration, the whole iPod discussion is a ridiculous distraction that is only used for “prurient” interest. It probably has no bearing on the result at all, and if he were wearing a generic mp3 player it wouldn’t even have been mentioned.

  • jimmyjet

    “Hard to say whether volume control might have saved him, but it’s worth thinking about.”

    No. It isn’t. The plane had no prop, no engine and NO HORN. It would have killed anyone unlucky enough to be in its path who wasn’t looking up at the time. It’s called a red herring. Let’s not turn it into a red flag.

  • Alex

    “basically gliding”

    No it was gliding ….. But why is this article on this site ?

  • http://www.markcrummett.com Mark Crummett

    Time to mandate horns for all aircraft.

  • TRRosen

    Correct title to say “iPod User Murdered by over-entitled Pilot” Prop or not you can still steer! The pilot needs to be charged with at least manslaughter.