Officials have identified the flight instructor who died this week in a crash near Gainesville, on a flight that had taken off from Denton Enterprise Airport about an hour earlier, according to local news reports.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash, which took place around 8:50 p.m. Tuesday near Gainesville Municipal Airport, FOX 4 reported. The instructor pilot, 27-year-old Bailey Maldonado of Granbury, was pronounced dead at the scene, WFAA reported. The student co-pilot, 26-year-old James Watts of Oregon, was airlifted to a Denton hospital with serious injuries.
They were the only people on the single-engine Cessna 172 when it crashed. The NTSB is planning to complete a preliminary report on the crash within a month, according to WFAA.
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