NTSB: Pilot Had Filed No Plan Before Clayton Crash

Garry Stephen Reid, of Galivants Ferry, S.C., died Sept. 21 when his single-engine 1947 North American Navion crashed into the front of McCall's BBQ and Seafood restaurant, at 10365 U.S. Highway 70 West. Reid was headed for Culpeper, Va., officials said. Clayton police said he had moved from Virginia to South Carolina.

No one else was injured in the crash, which occurred about an hour before the popular restaurant was scheduled to open for lunch.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the crash, the agency said. But in a preliminary report released Wednesday, the NTSB said Reid didn't file a flight plan when he left the Conway-Horry County Airport in South Carolina about an hour before the crash, and he never contacted any air traffic control operators during the flight.

The section of Federal Aviation Administration ruled cited by the NTSB does not require a flight plan for a personal flight under visual flight rules, which conditions in Horry County allowed when Reid took off.

Witnesses said the plane banked as it approached 40-foot-high power lines, but a preliminary examination of the crash site showed no damage to the power lines, the report said. The McCall's parking lot had five scars almost 134 feet from the power lines, the report said.

The plane came to rest upside-down inside the restaurant, the engine separated from the fuselage and the propeller broke off from the engine, the report said. One of the three propeller blades ended up in a neighborhood about 280 feet from the restaurant, the report said.

The owners of McCall's said they plan to rebuild and hope to reopen by next spring.