Before a single-engine plane crashed into a mobile home park, killing three after dark on Feb. 1, radio transmissions make clear that the pilot couldn’t find where he was supposed to land — the runway at Clearwater Airpark.

Shortly after 7 p.m., nearly an hour after sunset, Jemin G. Patel flew northwest across Clearwater and passed to the west of the airpark before looping around in an attempt to land at an airport to the southeast, according to flight path data and radio transmissions.

“Coming to Albert Whitted,” he said on the radio, a reference to St. Petersburg’s downtown airport. “I can’t see the other airport.”

He would never make it.

Seconds later, Patel, 54, said he was “losing engine” and crashed into a mobile home on the eastern edge of Clearwater, killing him and two women inside the home.

It was a clear night with ideal flying conditions of cool air and light wind. So why couldn’t he see the runway?

While federal aviation officials are investigating the crash, eight local pilots interviewed by the Tampa Bay Times said that Clearwater Airpark is unusually dark and difficult to find at night in a sea of city lights. Like many general aviation airports, its runway lights are off until approaching pilots activate them by tapping the button they use to talk on the radio frequency.

But Clearwater is unlike most other public general aviation airports in that it doesn’t have a rotating beacon, a common feature that serves as a kind of lighthouse for planes at night. Fixed atop a tower, it can help pilots detect a runway from as far as 20 miles out.

Clearwater officials discussed installing a beacon as early as 2017, according to video of city meetings. Four years ago, a consultant recommended installing one before the end of 2020. It hasn’t happened.

Of the 24 general aviation airports open to the public in eight West Central Florida counties, Clearwater Airpark is one of only five without a beacon, according to aeronautical charts that pilots use to assess airports’ capabilities.

But it’s the only one without a beacon that has night flights in a dense, residential area where the margin for error is small. Of the four other public airports with no beacon in the region, two are not open after dark, one sits in rural Palmetto and the other averages 10 flights a day in Polk County.

“The best way to see where the airpark is (at night) is to look for the black hole,” said Bruce Brock, a retired commercial airline and Air Force pilot whose term on Clearwater’s airpark advisory board ended this month.

Consultants wrote a 20-year master plan for the airpark in February 2020, saying that a beacon should be the first of two dozen upgrades. But then the pandemic hit, and the City Council did not approve the plan until May 2021.

Meanwhile, leadership of the marine and aviation department had been in flux, with four directors in the past seven years. Then in 2022 the city focused on hiring a new company to run the airpark. When FlyUSA took over early last year, it was the first operator change in 20 years.

Although the master plan included an implementation schedule, Ed Chesney, the marine and aviation director from 2017 to 2021, said the timeline was not rigid, and more of a long-term vision with more projects than the city could ever afford.

Chesney said the airpark focused first on addressing long-needed safety and maintenance issues, like tenants’ code violations, constructing a new hangar, improving fire suppression, installing new cameras and increasing rents to help the airpark become profitable.

“The beacon was put in the master plan but I don’t recall any intense discussions about it,” Chesney said.

Michael MacDonald, the current director, said he expects a beacon to be installed by next year as part of a series of upgrades from the master plan that were initiated in coordination with the airpark’s new operator.

But for pilots like Brock, it’s hard not to think that a rotating beacon could have made a difference for a pilot who, in his final moments, said he couldn’t find Clearwater’s runway.

“I really think it contributed to the accident, and I regret not making more noise about it in years past,” Brock said at an airpark advisory board meeting six days after the crash. “This rotating beacon, it’s not a nice thing to have. It’s really essential.”

Night landings take guesswork

Clearwater Airpark handles about 50,000 takeoffs and landings each year, and the vast majority are incident free.

Of the 12 investigations the National Transportation Safety Board completed on accidents at the airpark in the last decade, most were minor, like hard landings and engine trouble. There was one fatality in May 2017 when a pilot crashed east of the runway at 7:22 p.m. after attempting to land while a line of rain showers was crossing the airpark, according to the safety board’s report.

Although the Federal Aviation Administration requires airports with runway edge lights to have a rotating beacon, Clearwater is not bound by that rule because the airpark does not take federal funding.

But in interviews with the Times, local pilots described the difficulty of finding the airpark at night without a rotating beacon, especially for those unfamiliar with local landmarks.

Ron Simonton, a flight instructor who has flown at the airpark for 30 years, said his trick is to look for the lights shining from a ballfield near The Landings Golf Course along the airpark’s western edge. He said pilots also use the street lights along Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard to the south and Hercules Avenue to the east to get their bearings.

“Otherwise, it’s a pretty good guess,” Simonton said. “I know the airpark is hard to see at night because I’ve experienced that.”

Clearwater Airpark sits in the middle of densely populated Pinellas County, with homes just south of the runway and warehouses and neighborhoods to the east.

For decades, as the residential area grew around the airpark, the city has fielded complaints from neighbors about noise and activity from the planes.

Bruce Kaiser, a private pilot who has flown from there for 25 years, said that, from the sky, the runway can get lost in the lights of the city. At other airports, he said, the rotating lights of a beacon are clearly distinguishable from streetlights.

“We’ve landed at strange airports that we’ve never been to at night and never had a problem, and then we’d get home to our home field in Clearwater and can’t find the damn thing,” Kaiser said.

After FlyUSA took over operations in March 2023, CEO Barry Shevlin briefed the Clearwater Airpark board members on safety upgrades he had made in his first two months.

FlyUSA brought in two fuel trucks with safety monitoring for spills and replaced hoses that were out of date. They got rid of “unairworthy” planes that were derelict or uninsured and hired overnight security.

Shevlin announced that a rotating beacon was also a priority that they would “accomplish this year.”

“The airpark is — it’s hard to find at night,” he said at a May meeting. “We’re going to put a rotating beacon in to help with visibility after dark. We think that’s probably another safety improvement that should be … not a terribly heavy lift for us.”

But installing the beacon turned out to be more complicated than expected, Shevlin explained in an interview.

Since FlyUSA took over, MacDonald said the city has advanced a series of upgrades including the beacon, a parking lot expansion, asphalt repaving and construction of a new terminal and corporate hangars, the first items to move forward from the 2020 master plan.

FlyUSA is also pursuing an “instrument approach” capability for the airpark, which would allow pilots to use GPS to guide them into a landing in cloudy conditions.

Before any of those projects can be implemented, a survey and geotechnical study of the park must be completed. They will determine the height and location for the beacon and runway markings for the GPS approach, said MacDonald.

“It’s a survey of the entire park so not everything is piecemealed,” MacDonald said. “The rotating beacon could have been done without that. The only issue is we’d be wasting money because at some point we might need to go in there and correct the location, the height.”

The department applied for a state grant to conduct the survey and geotechnical study last year.

The Florida Department of Transportation approved $80,000 for the survey on Nov. 17, according to the agreement. The City Council gave final approval on Feb. 15, clearing the way to hire an engineer.

After the survey is done, the city will have to apply for a state grant to fund the design and construction of the beacon, MacDonald said. He could not say how much it will cost, but the 2020 consultant estimated $89,000.

To pay for airpark projects, the city doesn’t tap into its $153 million capital improvements budget. The airpark is a self-sustaining operation, meaning it doesn’t get tax money and operates with revenue it takes in from the operator’s lease payments. Most projects are paid for with state grants and some costs are shared with the operator. The airport fund is currently in the red and had $750,000 in unrestricted reserves last year, according to MacDonald.

After the Feb. 1 crash, Shevlin said he spoke with MacDonald about the need to expedite the beacon as much as they could. After the survey is completed, Shevlin said the beacon will be the first project advanced.

“We assumed (after the crash) there would be questions about why there’s no beacon there,” Shevlin said. “Certainly we’d like to accelerate getting that, but we do have some dependencies.”

“Whatever it takes to fix this”

When pilots are communicating on the Tampa radio frequency, they have to switch to Clearwater’s frequency to activate the airpark’s runway lights.

Patel departed from Vero Beach Regional Airport at 6:08 p.m. on Feb. 1 headed for Clearwater Airpark, according to FlightAware.com, which tracks air traffic around the world.

When Patel was about 4.6 nautical miles east of the Clearwater Airpark, he acknowledged the need to get on Clearwater’s communication system, according to an analysis of the radio transmissions and flight path by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

“Roger, we’re still looking, ah, we’ll have to switch to other frequency for the lights,” Patel said on the Tampa frequency. At that moment, the airpark was at his 2 o’clock position, according to the association.

Shevlin said that, on the night of the crash, the runway lights were on when Patel was in the vicinity of the airpark.

He could not confirm if Patel or another pilot in the sky or on the ground turned them on. But even with the runway lights, Patel’s radio transmission indicates he could not find the airpark.

A short time later, Patel reported his engine was failing. The cause of the crash has not been determined.

Patrick Keenan, a retired corporate pilot who flies into Clearwater Airpark frequently at night, said he’s had trouble seeing the runway lights even when they were on. “If it had a rotating beacon, (Patel) wouldn’t have started heading to another airport.”

Along with Patel, two women inside the mobile home died in the crash: Martha Parry, 86, who lived there, and her friend Mary Ellen Pender, 54, of Treasure Island, who was visiting.

Parry’s son, Bill Parry, said the family is trying to process how the crash could have happened. Although nighttime crashes are not a pattern near the airpark, Parry said “all it takes is one, and unfortunately it was us.”

“This should never happen again, so whatever it takes to fix this so no other family has to go through this is important,” Parry said. “If a beacon is something that should have been there, it should have been fixed a long time ago.”