A small plane carrying a pilot and two 6-year-old children slammed into a tree while approaching Troy Skypark's grass runway Wednesday night, leaving the pilot critically injured and coming to rest in a soybean field in Monroe Township. The children had already climbed out of the wreckage and were sitting inside a bystander's vehicle along the roadway by the time first responders arrived.
The crash happened shortly after 9:30 p.m. near the 3300 block of Monroe-Concord Road, adjacent to the Troy Skypark airstrip, according to a statement from the Ohio State Highway Patrol relayed on Facebook by Tony Heitmeyer. As reported by WSYX, the aircraft — a single-engine Bellanca 7ECA — struck a tree while approaching the runway, and the Piqua Post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol is investigating the crash.
First responders found the pilot, identified by WSYX as 49-year-old Troy J. Hahn, unresponsive and trapped inside the wreckage before crews extricated him, per the Facebook account of the OSHP statement. Hahn suffered life-threatening injuries and was flown by air ambulance to Premier Health Miami Valley Hospital, the station's report notes, while the two 6-year-old passengers suffered only minor injuries and were taken by ground ambulance to Premier Health Upper Valley Medical Center.
A Rescue Team Scrambled to a Fuel Leak
Beyond the medical response, the Miami County Emergency Management Agency and the chief of the county's Hazardous Materials and Special Operations Response Team also responded to the scene to mitigate a minor fuel leak from the downed plane, according to the same Facebook account of the OSHP statement.
The aircraft that went down, tail number N5065K, is a 1979 Bellanca 7ECA Citabria registered directly to Troy J. Hahn at a Troy, Ohio address, under a certificate issued in September 2019, according to AircraftOne.com registration records. The Citabria is a light, fabric-covered aerobatic plane built with welded metal tubing, seating a pilot and a single passenger in tandem, and fitted with conventional tailwheel landing gear, per Wikipedia.
A Grass Runway With Known Tree Obstacles
Troy Skypark, listed under FAA identifier 37I, is a 72-acre privately owned public-use airport with a single 3,450-foot unpaved turf runway, and its approach boundaries have displaced thresholds because of trees ranging from 58 to 73 feet tall, according to Wikipedia and Fun Places to Fly. Those obstacle conditions sit at the heart of the preliminary account that the plane struck a tree while landing, though it remains unclear why the flight was approaching the unpaved strip so late in the evening, and whether visibility or mechanical factors played any role.
Hahn was taken to Miami Valley Hospital, which operates a Level I trauma center verified by the American College of Surgeons and provides 24-hour availability and surgical critical care, according to Premier Health. He was flown there by CareFlight Air and Mobile Services, a regional air ambulance program established in 1983 that now serves more than 300 agencies across 17 counties in Ohio and Indiana, Premier Health notes.
Federal Investigators Take Over From Here
Both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have been notified of the crash, and the investigation remains ongoing, per WSYX. In general aviation crashes, local authorities typically manage the scene and medical response while the NTSB serves as the lead agency in determining probable cause, supported by preliminary information from the FAA, according to the agency's own published protocol.
Landing and approach maneuvers account for the largest share of general aviation accidents nationwide, with NTSB data showing more than 20,000 recorded crashes tied to that phase of flight, according to Clifford Law Offices' analysis of the agency's database. That broader pattern underscores why approach-phase collisions with trees or other ground obstacles remain a recurring hazard for private pilots flying into strips like Troy Skypark. Hoodline has covered a similar crash before in rural Ohio, and the cause of Wednesday's crash awaits the NTSB's findings.
