{"id":1718,"date":"2026-04-30T00:55:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T00:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/1718\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T00:55:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T00:55:12","slug":"atsb-confirms-student-and-instructor-killed-in-parafield-plane-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/1718\/","title":{"rendered":"ATSB confirms student and instructor killed in Parafield plane crash"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ATSB has confirmed that an instructor and a student died in yesterday’s plane crash at Adelaide’s Parafield Airport.<\/p>\n

The transport safety bureau said it will start processing the accident site within the next hour or so.<\/p>\n

A pilot and passenger died after they hit a hangar shortly after take-off in the afternoon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The hangar caught fire and several people inside were injured with one person suffering life-threatening “serious and significant burns”.<\/p>\n

“We do know that quite tragically the instructor and the student have lost their lives,” ATSB chief commissioner Angus Mitchell told ABC News Breakfast.<\/p>\n

“Equally we do know that a number of people were inside the hangar that’s impacted with varying degrees in injuries from quite significant burns to smoke inhalation.”<\/p>\n

\"White<\/p>\n

Smoke from the fire was seen several kilometres east of Parafield Airport. (Supplied: Jim Kourtesis)<\/p>\n

Mr Mitchell said the plane had been doing circuit training at the airport.<\/p>\n

But it’s not yet known if structured training was underway when it crashed and that will be investigated.<\/p>\n

“That will potentially give us some ideas of what may have gone wrong, but there’s a lot of evidence for us to go through before we can get any answers to potentially what contributed to yesterday’s catastrophic outcome,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Our focus for the next couple of days will be on processing the site here, trying to understand not only the sequence of events but what potentially contributed to it.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Angus Mitchell at the scene of a plane crash at Parafield Airport. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)<\/p>\n

“We know the aircraft was only in the air for a very short period of time.”<\/p>\n

He said the investigation would likely take up to three to four days.<\/p>\n

“There’s been a lot of damage in that aircraft hangar,” he said.<\/p>\n

“So, not only the aircraft that’s involved in the accident has succumbed to a very significant post-impact fire.<\/p>\n

“There’s been a number of other aircraft that were being worked on in the hangar that have also been destroyed.”<\/p>\n

“Processing the site, particularly a carbon-fibre fire that’s occurred here, does take us some time.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Damage on a hangar at Parafield Airport after a light aircraft crashed through the roof. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)<\/p>\n

Police yesterday said the two people who died were the pilot and passenger of the Diamond DA42 twin-engined aircraft, and that several people on the ground had been injured.<\/p>\n

They said one person had suffered life-threatening “serious and significant burns” and had been taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, while two others had been hospitalised with serious injuries.<\/p>\n

All of those injured had been in the hangar at the time of the crash.<\/p>\n

A large number of student pilots were among those evacuated from the scene.<\/p>\n

‘Massive impact on families’<\/p>\n

This morning, SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said there’s a lot of work to be done to figure out what went wrong.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Police outside the Flight Training Adelaide at Parafield Airport after a plane crash yesterday. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)<\/p>\n

“This was a terrible incident that’s having a massive impact on so many families,” he told 891 ABC Adelaide.<\/p>\n

“The first responders, particularly the SA MFS were there as rapidly as you could expect \u2026 there’s a lot of work to be done.<\/p>\n

“Obviously we’re monitoring the condition of the people who are in hospital and we’re hoping they make a full recovery but there are some people that are very seriously injured.”<\/p>\n

Commissioner Stevens said he felt for those impacted by the crash, particularly the students at the training facility.<\/p>\n

“Not just first responders, it’s not the sort of thing people reflect on too often is the types of incidents that firies, our paramedics, police, CFS regularly attend and the sort of trauma they have to deal with,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But it’s also the people who are in the general vicinity who were unfortunate enough to see this plane crash into a building, you can’t imagine how difficult that would be to process.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Parafield Airport is a general aviation airport in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. (ABC News: Michael Clements)<\/p>\n

Mr Mitchell said yesterday’s crash was the 70th training incident that had been investigated in the past 10 years.<\/p>\n

“We do know that training is a vital part of the aviation industry,” he said.<\/p>\n

“What we don’t want to see is pilots faced with an incident in the air and the first time has been when it actually happens in real life.<\/p>\n

“We do want pilots to understand emergency procedures in a training environment, but training does bring an inherently different risk profile.<\/p>\n

“It’s very important that training is done under some very rigorous standards in terms of the mitigations.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ATSB has confirmed that an instructor and a student died in yesterday’s plane crash at Adelaide’s Parafield…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[395,2805,2153,22,21,1991,1046,844,2713,2804,1999,2806],"class_list":{"0":"post-1718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"tag-adelaide","9":"tag-airport","10":"tag-atsb","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-austrlia","13":"tag-crash","14":"tag-emergency","15":"tag-fire","16":"tag-hangar","17":"tag-parafield","18":"tag-plane","19":"tag-sa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}