The pilot of the plane that crashed in Armonk yesterday killing all four people on board had once safely landed his plane after its engines failed over Martha's Vineyard 15 years ago. 63-year-old Keith Weiner was an experienced pilot who lectured on emergency landings and would purposely turn off his engines at high altitudes to practice emergency procedures. "It must've been a mechanical failure," Weiner's 85-year-old father William—who is also a former pilot—tells the Post, "because my son wouldn't have failed."
Weiner's Cessna 210 crashed around 1:06 p.m. right after taking off from the Westchester County Airport. The family, who lived on West 57th street, had planned to have lunch in Montauk, when Weiner informed the control tower that the plane would be returning to Westchester before crashing "two miles from the airport, with the three-blade propeller and engine still intact." A spokesman for the NTSB tells the paper that, "The cause can't be answered as of yet. We do know that the entire cockpit was engulfed in flames, and there was no black box."
After making a "miraculous pinpoint landing smack on the runway" at Martha's Vineyard in 1997, Weiner was seen as an expert in emergency landings. The elder Weiner noted that he wanted to make yesterday's flight early in the day so that he could spend the rest of Father's Day with him, saying, "He was more than a son. He was my best friend." Weiner's wife Lisa, their 14-year old daughter Isabel, and her 14-year-old friend Lucy Walsh were all killed in the crash.
