SALT LAKE CITY — Friends of Creighton King, the racing pilot who died in a West Jordan plane crash Wednesday, are now remembering him and the hobby they bonded over.
WATCH: What to know about racing plane in West Jordan crash
Mike Patey had known King for 20 years as friends and business partners who shared the same passion for building planes and flying them in competitions.
“He was the first to say, ‘When it’s my time, I don’t ever want to go, I want to be here forever but when it’s my time, I want it to be in an airplane,'” said Patey.
Racing planes can be a risky hobby and King was one month away from a race in Reno.
“Incidents usually occur approaching the big event because everybody’s now testing their new designs or pushing the limits of their designs to see how they do,” Patey explained.
The National Transportation Safety Board said King was flying an “experimental homebuilt” Hensler Cassutt.
“The experimental is not so much you put wire and duct tape to something and jump off the roof your house and break your leg,” explained Patey. “Experimental is more how do we advance aviation? How do we get faster? How do we improve the wing?”
The hobby of building an airplane is becoming more popular, and there's no reason have to tweak it or test it’s extremes like the competitive world Patey and King are a part of.
Utah company Rocky Mountain Kitplanes sells the parts to build a plane and also offers flight lessons in Fairfield.
“There’s two different sides of experimental,” said flight instructor Matthew Kalm. “There’s the ‘go fast, push the aircraft to its limits, race the aircraft’ which is wonderful and great and it’s brought a lot of advancement to aviation. But there’s also the more leisurely flying.”
Kalm said to not let the “experimental” wording worry anyone. It’s a designation by the FAA and all aircraft must follow specific guidelines before it can fly.
“All that means is you went outside of a factory’s design and added your own things to it,” he said.
King loved doing just that.
Air safety investigators said it’ll take two weeks to release a preliminary report on what caused the crash.
“If Creighton were standing right here he’d crack a joke. He’d make you laugh, in spite of the hardest times,” said Patey. “We’re going to miss him.”
