Roy • Ryann Steed had just finished a long shift at the clinic and was crawling under the covers to take a nap when she heard a loud bang that seemed to have come from her roof.
She thought it was odd — why would anything up there make noise? — but she figured maybe a truck had crashed outside. After all, her little street in Roy has been coated in thick ice for at least a week and sound carries. She ran downstairs to check.
When Steed opened her front door, a small plane was lying on the asphalt at the end of her driveway, engulfed in flames. She started walking toward it to see if anyone was inside. As she moved forward, the remaining hunk of metal exploded.
The pilot — a 64-year-old man and the sole occupant of the plane — died in the crash Wednesday afternoon, investigators said. He was later identified as David Goode, owner of the Ogden-based company Goode Ski Technologies.
It’s unclear what caused Goode to veer off course and land in the residential neighborhood near 5050 South and 1800 West, said Roy police Sgt. Matthew Gwynn. No one else was injured.
“We don’t know what went wrong,” Gwynn added. “But it’s under investigation. It’s just very somber.”
The plane clipped the roof of the townhome adjoining Steed’s, and the wing was still partially lodged among the shingles. There was a gaping hole. A downed tree on the park strip where the pilot landed. Debris everywhere. When firefighters opened the front door of the house, planks of wood hung down from the ceiling. The residents of that townhome were not inside at the time, Gwynn said.
Next door, Steed recalled Wednesday afternoon, “the whole house shook. It just shook the whole thing.”
She and three other houses were evacuated for the night after the crash caused a gas leak. While Steed stood outside still wrapped in a blanket from her nap, her husband, Tyson, ran to the store to grab some cat food and toothbrushes for them so they could go stay with family. They were allowed back in their house only for a minute to grab their two cats.
The plane crash is the fourth in the area in at least the last three years. Most recently, in November, a plane made an emergency landing on Interstate 15 — also south of the Ogden-Hinckley Airport — under unknown circumstances and injured two people. The same plane landed on I-15 previously in May 2018, clipping a car.
Two couples were killed in July 2017 when the engine failed shortly after taking off from the Ogden airport.
Goode had left Bountiful at 3 p.m. and was expected to land at the Ogden airport at 3:11 p.m., Gwynn said. Weber County dispatchers received the call that it had crashed at 3:12 p.m. — a half-mile before reaching the runway. The plane hit one house, pulling off a strand of Christmas lights, before sliding onto the road and landing in a parking area.
It was not immediately known whether the Goode was flying the plane — a twin engine Cessna — with proper certification or if the plane had completed its annual inspections. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
His ski company posted on Facebook late Wednesday that he “touched the lives of thousands of people by helping them, and the sports they love, push the limits of performance.” He was an international competitor in both water skiing and snow skiing.
Goode is survived by his wife, Dawn, and their four children and two grandchildren.
Neighbors in the surrounding houses and apartments stood outside, watching black smoke rising from the crumpled and contorted plane as crews cleaned up the wreckage. Some hugged. A few cried.
Rozie Nelson, who works as an aviation mechanic at the Ogden airport, came to look at the scene. A friend of hers had texted her a photo of the red-and-white plane in the air a few minutes before it crashed. He told her: “Their engine is running rough.”
She believes that could mean a fuel issue or something internal in the engine, such as moisture in there. Additionally, she said, the model is older and those planes tend to malfunction.
Nelson spoke to police officers at the crash scene to help. They covered the plane in a white cloth after extinguishing the fire, making it blend in with the snowy ground.
Kayla Davis, a nurse who lives nearby, stood behind a line of yellow police tape and watched. Earlier, she had heard the crash from her home and ran outside with her dog. Her neighbor yelled, “Call 911.” She jumped over her fence to help.
“Then it exploded like on a movie,” she said. “It was very hard to watch.”
Davis said with the recurring plane crashes in the area, she’s now considering finding another home. She had just moved to the area in October.
(Photo courtesy of Rozie Nelson) A picture of a plane sent to Rozie Nelson before it crashed in Roy on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2020.
Andrew Jackson, like Steed, was sleeping. He works nights and the sound of the crash woke him up.
“It was loud,” he said. “It was weird, low pitch, really deep.”
After walking around the scene, he walked back to his house. Steed and her husband were not able to do the same.
