The aircraft involved in Tuesday’s crash south of Tonganoxie is a type that frequents the Lawrence airport on training missions. The local aviation community now must deal with the perception of safety of private aviation.

“Aviation in general is very safe,” said Lloyd Hetrick, president of Hetrick Aviation based at Lawrence Municipal Airport. Regarding the plane crash, flight instructor Tom Renfro added, “I would much prefer my kids to be out flying an airplane than riding a motorcycle.”

That seems to be the consensus within the aviation community, but accidents do happen, even to the most experienced pilots, and the news of a fatal plane crash never gets any easier. Especially here in Lawrence where training flights are common.”Whether it’s in training or recurring or proficiency, they do it quite often and Lawrence is quite good for that because we have all of the major instrument approaches and we’re not at a controlled airport,” Hetrick said.

“It’s just kind of put a gloom over everybody today and flight students are concerned about the accident,” said Renfro, chief flight instructor at the airport.

Instructors and technicians are now looking to learn more about the cause of this accident, thus tailoring their own plans and flight preparations to help prevent future problems.Hetrick said, “it’s going to boil down to either weather related, pilot error or aircraft malfunction, of which once they determine that, what we are going to do different in our training techniques or what happened to the aircraft that we can start an inspection procedure on.”