Because there were no major injuries, the National Transportation Safety Board is awaiting a damage report.
The National Transportation Safety Board is awaiting word from the Federal Aviation Administration's local office in Allentown before assigning its own federal investigators to two airplane crashes over the holiday weekend.
A plane went down about 5 p.m. Thursday in a field near the Wells Fargo Bank at 1300 Uhler Road in Forks Township. Aliosman A. Bilukbash, who was the only one in the aircraft at the time, escaped without injury except for a cut finger, authorities said.
View full sizeA small airplane crashed late Friday morning on Gwinnup Road in Blairstown Township shortly after taking off from the local airport. A single-engine Pa-28-140 crashed Friday morning shortly after taking off from Blairstown Township Airport. The plane came down at 65 Gwinnup Road in the township and neither Craig Levine, of Blue Bell, Pa., nor his passenger, Matthew Giannini, of Harleysville, Pa., were injured, authorities said.
Dennis Diaz, an air safety investigator with the Office of Aviation Safety Eastern Region in Virginia, said the NTSB is awaiting word from local FAA officials on both crashes. Because there were no major injuries in either, Diaz said, the national agency must now wait to see if the damage caused in the crashes was substantial enough to warrant a full investigation from their office.
"If that's the case, we'll assign an investigator," Diaz said.
Jim Peters, spokesman with the FAA, said if the damage in a crash is below a federal threshold, then it's categorized as an "incident" and the FAA is in charge of the investigation. The crash will be upgraded to an "accident" and bumped up to the NTSB if the damage is substantial enough, Peters said.
He said the FAA will be doing the preliminary assessment work on both crashes this week.