Mid-Air Collision Over Colorado

I just saw some amateur footage of this crash:

A small plane clipped the towline of another plane pulling a glider Saturday, sparking a fiery midair crash in Colorado and killing three people, authorities said.

The glider disconnected from its tow plane just before the collision that sent both planes plummeting to the ground, Boulder County sheriff's office spokesman Rick Brough said.

The glider landed safely — with no injuries to any of the three people on board — after the two planes made impact, authorities said.

"We understand the glider went through a fireball after the impact," NTSB field investigator Jennifer Rodi.

The crash occurred about 1:30 p.m. near the Boulder Municipal Airport.

"We heard a loud bang and looked up in the air and we saw what looked like a glider and big, black smoke right next to it," said witness Paul Aiken. "It looked like fireworks, the explosion."

The pilot of the glider was Ruben Bakker, according to his mother-in-law Deborah Tjarks, who spoke to The Associated Press. She said he saw the collision about to happen and released the glider and banked but still flew through a fireball. Bakker did not immediately return a call for comment.

Brough said one of the planes, a Piper Pawnee with just a pilot aboard, belonged to Mile High Gliding Inc. and had just taken off from the Boulder airport with the glider in tow shortly before the accident happened.

A woman who answered the phone at the glider company declined to comment.

The other plane, a single-engine, four-seat Cirrus SR20, was carrying two people.

What was unusual about the video was the burning wreckage that was descending under a large parachute. That was Cirrus SR20, one of the only small civilian aircraft with an on-board rocket-propelled parachute system. There have been numerous incidents in which pilots got themselves into trouble and were able to activate the parachute and land with minimal damage to plane and occupants. It's a big selling point for those airplanes.

I'm not sure if the parachute in this case was activated by the pilot, or if it deployed automatically, but it worked as advertised. Unfortunately the fire or trauma from the crash itself killed the occupants despite the low speed impact. There wasn't much left of the plane by the time authorities got on scene.