PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. – A family is grieving the loss of a beloved pilot killed in a crash at North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines Friday.
Felipe Becerra Cardenas, 31, died after his single-engine Cessna crashed shortly after takeoff.
Shelby Thomas, 23 and and Jamal Hall, 25, of Georgia, were Cardenas’ passengers. They were being taken on a “discovery flight,” where a person pays a pilot to take them on a flight to see if they are interested in getting their pilot’s license.
Thomas died a day after the crash and Hall remained in the hospital.
Cardenas’ cousin, Iliana Marquez Sinecio, spoke to Local 10 News from Mexico, where Felipe was from.
“Felipe was a person who worked hard for what he wanted. As a child, he loved soccer. It was always on his mind that he wanted to be a pilot,” Marquez Sinecio said in Spanish. “His whole life, we’re a big family and we grew up together. We were always with our family. I hadn’t seen him in a while since he moved to Miami to study.”
She said Cardenas had been living in South Florida for five years. He had been an instructor with the Aviation Academy for the past 10 months.
“He always worked hard for what he wanted,” Marquez Sinecio said. “And he worked very hard for it too.”
National Transportation Safety Board investigators said they would take the plane to Fort Pierce to further look into what went wrong.
Security footage from the airport will also be looked at to see what happened before and after the crash.
NTSB investigators said they will put out a preliminary crash report in the coming days.