Two brothers from Bangalore and one American died in a Plane crash near Fort Worth, TX.
Dallas, TX: Kartik Kalaichelvan, 22 yrs, and Casey Brinegar, 26 yrs, both pilot instructors at Skymates Flight College in Arlington, TX and Pratik Kalaichelvan, 19 yrs, got killed in a plane crash on Tuesday, July 13th at 9:30 PM in a small town called Tolar (45miles of Southwest of Fort Worth).
Pratik who was studying dentistry in Chennai came to visit his brother and supposed to go back to India in a couple of days. Casey and Kartik were showing Pratik, who was visiting from India, Texas from the sky. All three of them flew out in Casey’s four-seat, single engine aircraft on Tuesday night for a dinner and coming back to Arlington Airport when this accident happened.
The right wing of the 1964 “Beech Craft Bonanza” hit the ground, and the single-engine plane tumbled, according to an NTSB investigator. A witness told investigators that the engine sounded rough and then the four-seat airplane nosedived.
Kartik learned to fly from Casey, and was accumulating flight time before returning to India to be a commercial pilot like his dad. Kartik and Pratik’s father Alangiam P. Kalaichelvan works as a pilot for King Fisher Airlines in Bangalore.
Casey and Kartik died at the scene and Pratik was taken by a helicopter to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth where he later died. There was no fire and no one else was hurt. The cause of the crash was still under investigation.
“Parents of Kartik and Pratik are in transit to Dallas and are expected to reach here Friday morning. Srinivas Lanka, Morgan, friends of Kartik and a team of volunteers are making arrangements to get all the needed documents and transfer the bodies to a local funeral home. Parents want to take the bodies of their sons to Bangalore so we are making necessary arrangements. We express our deepest condolences to Kalaichelvan family on the loss of two young men”, said Prasad Thotakura, General Secretary of the Indian American Friendship Council (IAFC).
