The Brooklyn pilot of the charter jet that crashed in Colorado, killing a son of NBC sports chief Dick Ebersol, was a careful man who wouldn’t cut corners by failing to de-ice the aircraft, relatives said yesterday.
“He was a very experienced pilot, a very religious man and a very responsible and this is the first time in 20 years that something happened to him,” said Efigenia Santana, 37, a cousin of pilot Luis Polanco. “I don’t believe that he left ice on the plane.”
Said sister-in-law Eli Polanco, 38: “There were never any problems, never any accidents.”
Polanco, 50, flight attendant Warren Richardson, 36, and Ebersol’s 14-year-old son, Edward, were killed Sunday when the plane crashed and burned while taking off by Montrose Regional Airport.
Ebersol, 57, and his son, Charles, 21, were in stable condition and expected to recover. Co-pilot Eric Wicksell was in very serious condition in a Denver burn center.
Officials said the wings of the jet, a Canadian-built Challenger 600, were not de-iced because Polanco didn’t request it.
Ice buildup on the wings was blamed for the horrific crash of a later-model Challenger at the Birmingham, England airport in January 2002. All five people on board were killed.
“The similarities are quite substantial and we don’t have that very often in our business,” said National Transportation Safety Board chairman Ellen Engleman Connors.
Edward’s body was found under the charred wreckage of the plane Monday afternoon.
“We will miss, Teddy, our sweet boy, forever,” the Ebersol family said in a statement.
“He had developed a wonderfully quirky sense of humor way beyond his years that kept the whole family laughing.”
Eyewitnesses said the jet barely became airborne, veered right, then banked left, its left wing scraping the ground. It crashed through a fence, broke in two and began to burn.
It was eerily similar to the crash in Birmingham, where the plane rolled rapidly to the left on takeoff because of ice on the left wing.
The wing scraped the runway and the plane flipped over and began to burn.
Polanco, a married father of three, came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a teen and graduated from Thomas Jefferson HS in Brooklyn.
Additional reporting by Barry Bortwick and Mike Bender