Pilot survived earlier accident

HARTFORD, Conn. — The plane accident that killed four people in a Connecticut neighborhood was not the first crash for the pilot, a former Microsoft executive who was taking his teenage son on a tour of East Coast colleges.

The pilot, Bill Henningsgaard, was presumed killed along with his son, Maxwell, and two children who were inside a house struck by the small propeller-driven plane Friday. Four bodies were recovered from the wreckage and sent to the Connecticut medical examiner’s office Saturday for identification, officials said.

Henningsgaard, a highly regarded philanthropist, was flying a small plane to Seattle in 2009 with his mother when the engine quit. He crash-landed on Washington’s Columbia River.

“I forced myself to confront that fact that the situation any pilot fears — a midair emergency, was happening right then, with my mother in the plane,” he wrote in a blog post days later.

In the Connecticut crash, Henningsgaard was coming in for a landing at Tweed New Haven Airport in rainy weather when the plane struck two small homes, engulfing them in flames. The aircraft’s left wing lodged in one house and its right wing in the other.

National Transportation Safety Board investigator Patrick Murray said Saturday that the plane was upside down when it struck a house at about a 60 degree angle. He said the pilot was making his first approach to the airport and did not declare an emergency before the crash.

In removing the wreckage and before analyzing any data, he said at a news conference in New Haven, “We don’t have any indication there was anything wrong with the plane.”