Aircraft Owned by Scottish Flight School Involved in Fatal Crash Were Subject of at Least Five Prior AAIB Investigations
Why It MattersFlight-school safety history sits in public investigation records, so a single fatal accident often prompts scrutiny of a fleet's earlier incidents, while the cause of this crash stays undetermined pending the investigation.
What happened
Aircraft owned by Leading Edge Flight Training, the firm involved in a fatal light-aircraft crash near Drymen, Stirlingshire, had been the subject of at least five previous investigations by the Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB), according to research by the Mail on Sunday.
The school owns eight light aircraft, including the Piper Tomahawk that crashed on October 16. The crash killed instructor Ian Haggis, 80, and 16-year-old Ryan Sprott, of Johnstone, Renfrewshire.
The AAIB records cover serious incidents since 2019. In July 2019, a Piper Tomahawk touched down short of the runway at Cu…
Industry impact & what to watch
Light-aircraft training fleets operate under public incident reporting, which means a school's earlier serious incidents can be retrieved and set side by side once a fatal accident draws attention. Prior investigations of a fleet's aircraft are a record of past events, not a finding about the cause of this crash.
The cause of the October 16 crash has not been determined and the investigation is ongoing. Whether any link exists between the earlier incidents and this accident is a question for the investigators, not for the history alone.
