The pepple are looking at the front of the airplane that got destroy. Photo by Adam Bell.
The pepple are looking at the front of the airplane that got destroy. Photo by Adam Bell.

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A person claiming to be the pilot of a plane involved in a mid-air plane crash at Hollister Municipal Airport on July 19 said he suffered a fractured leg in the incident.

The pilot, whose user name is Micslmn, and who goes by “Mike” in linked social media accounts, commented on a video regarding the collision, saying he was thankful to be alive.

“I was shooting this approach making the appropriate radio calls with all of the other aircrafts on frequency acknowledging me,” the post states. “I did not see this guy at all.”

The Hollister Municipal Airport does not have a communications tower so pilots have to communicate with each other through radio frequencies before and after taking off and landing.

A video of the collision posted on YouTube shows a small plane attempting to land at the airport and colliding with another small plane. The plane attempting to land then appears to almost nose-dive and slide for several feet. The other plane lands with no apparent problem. 

According to FlightAware, a flight tracking website, a 2017 Cirrus was attempting to land at Hollister airport after flying from Van Nuys Airport near Los Angeles. The plane took off at 10:07 a.m. and landed at 11:39 a.m. 

Image courtesy of FlightAware.
Image courtesy of FlightAware.

According to the log, the plane was diverted from the Monterey Regional Airport.

BenitoLink was unable to locate flight records for the other plane involved in the collision.

According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records, the registered owner of the plane taking off is Angelo Lombardo of Sunnyvale. 

The registered owner of the plane landing is Aviation Module LLC out of Los Angeles. 

This is the 10th accident at the airport since 2010 that has prompted an investigation by aviation authorities.

BenitoLink reached out to Mike but received no immediate response.

Hollister Airport Director Jeff Chechriou said there could have been numerous contributing factors as to why the planes were landing and taking off at the same time, including using the wrong radio frequency to notify surrounding aircraft of an aircraft’s plans and location, a theory proposed in a video analyzing the collision on YouTube.

Hollister Fire Battalion Chief Phil Rossi said the Cirrus suffered the most damage and its pilot was the one injured. Rossi said the airport runway was closed for about three hours following the collision to provide medical care to the pilots and clean up the site.

He said the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are conducting an investigation.

Mike indicated on YouTube that he provided all the relevant information to the FAA. According to his Instagram account, Mike is a tech executive and private pilot.

Chechriou said the airport does not disclose the names of pilots.

According to the NTSB database, there were 70 investigations into accidents at the airport since 1962 before last week’s collision. The most recent previous incident occurred in 2024 when an antique biplane flipped on the runway. The airport opened in 1912.

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Noe Magaña is a BenitoLink reporter. He began with BenitoLink as an intern and later served as a freelance reporter. He has also served as content manager and co-editor. He experiments with videography...