Leo "Kent" Wingate, as he approached Covington (Tenn.) Municipal Airport, Wednesday morning, sent his wife a text message in Dayton that he'd be landing in 45 minutes.
A call Katherine Wingate expected him never came.
Hours later, she learned that his 1979 Piper Archer PA-28 Cherokee crashed two miles from the airport in a wooded area in rural western Tennessee. There were no passengers on the plane.
Wingate, 62, had radioed the Covington airport to inform them that he'd have to make an emergency landing because he was low on fuel. The Xenia resident had taken off from the Dayton-Wright Bros. Airport in Miami Twp. to attend a close friend's funeral, his wife said.
Two crop dusters located the wreckage and rescued Wingate, a retired Air Force administrator and chairman and an instructor of Sinclair Community College's aviation program.
"It's your worst nightmare," Katherine Wingate said Friday during a video interview with the newspaper from the Elvis Presley Trauma Center at Regional One Health hospital in Memphis, where her husband was listed in critical but stable condition Friday night.
Katherine Wingate, a physician herself, said she's felt helpless to treat her husband. He remains unconscious and needs a ventilator to assist with his breathing since his lungs collapsed during the crash. Wingate underwent surgery to repair broken bones, and doctors still don't know the extent of the brain injury he suffered, his wife said.
"I'm usually the one calling the shots, giving the orders, healing the sick," Katherine Wingate she said. "It's kind of hard to be the one on the other side of the equation. I just want to hear his voice."
Although authorities believe her husband's plane crashed because it ran out of fuel, she said it's unlikely he miscalculated how much fuel he'd need.
Crashes not uncommon
The National Transportation Safety Board, the investigating agency for this incident, should have preliminary results in a few weeks, officials said.
Aircraft running out of fuel and crashing is not uncommon in the United States.
Since 2005, there have been 328 such crashes involving airplanes and helicopters, according to NTSB data the Dayton Daily News requested.
Of those crashes, three were in Ohio - Middletown, 2013; Louisville, 2009 and Edinburg, 2007.
In the nationwide crashes, 51 people died, 77 were seriously injured and 145 people received minor injuries.
Nearly 300 people suffered no injuries in those crashes, according to the data.