A pilot died Saturday after a small plane crashed just south of Dalton Municipal Airport in Chatsworth, Georgia, according to Murray County Sheriff Jimmy Davenport. The pilot was the only person aboard the aircraft, and authorities have withheld the pilot's name. Officials said the person was from the Morganton or Blue Ridge area.
According to WSB-TV, the aircraft was an Aero Commander AC11 that had taken off from Athens, Tennessee, and was headed for Dalton Municipal Airport when it went down about one-half mile south of the runway. Sheriff Davenport said his office dispatched deputies to the scene at 11:44 a.m. local time. A member of a nearby property owner's family discovered the wreckage, though the outlet's report does not detail the exact circumstances of that discovery.
NTSB Sends Investigator to the Crash Site
The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed the aircraft crashed about one-half mile south of the airport and said an NTSB investigator was traveling to the accident site, the same report notes. No cause, weather conditions, or mechanical findings have been released, and the investigation remains in its earliest stages.
Dalton Municipal Airport, identified by the code KDNN according to AirNav, is described by the City of Dalton as a general aviation airport that serves as a vital link between local industries and their customers and suppliers. It sits in the same North Georgia stretch that has seen aviation tragedy before.
A Deadly Precedent in the Same Area
In July 2017, a Piper PA-23-250 broke apart in flight near Chatsworth, killing the pilot and three passengers, per Kathryn's Report. That flight had originated in Tuskegee, Alabama, and was bound for McMinn County Airport in Athens, Tennessee — the same Tennessee city this weekend's flight had just departed. Investigators in the 2017 case later found no airframe or engine anomalies that would have prevented normal operation.
No such findings have been reported for Saturday's Chatsworth crash, and the cause remains under investigation. The NTSB's CAROL database, which tracks aviation investigations dating back to 1962, will likely be the eventual source of any formal findings once the agency completes its review.
