Three people die in plane crash near Gainesville airport, Three adults killed in plane crash from Ohio, Gainesville
Three people were killed in a single-engine plane crash Friday night moments after taking off from Lee Gilmer Memorial Airport in Gainesville.
The plane had just taken off from the Gainesville airport en route to Daytona Beach, Florida around 6 p.m. when it crashed into a ravine near the intersection of Memorial Park Drive at Atlanta Highway. One home on the ground was damaged by falling fuel, displacing five residents. No one on the ground was injured.
The three adults killed in the crash were identified by the Hall County Sheriff’s Office as Dan Delnoce, 44, and Courtney Flanders, 45, of Gainesville and Matthew Delnoce, 39, of Ohio. The Sheriff’s Office is handling the death investigation while the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are working other aspects of the crash.
When the YMCA Learning Center of Gainesville opened on Feb. 24, 2020, staff members had no idea that a global pandemic would come the following month.
The Georgia Mountains YMCA partnered with Evangel Church in Gainesville to open their new daycare, and according to Cassandra Whisnant, Program Director for the YMCA Learning Center, they had been opened and licensed for only three weeks before COVID-19 affected school systems. We started with two children enrolled, and at the time COVID took over, we had about six children enrolled, Whisnant said. So we shifted gears and offered crisis care.
The crisis care the Learning Center offered was geared toward school-aged children of first responders, medical personnel, truck drivers, grocery store workers and others. Originally, the program was closed to other children, but Whisnant said they had to shift their model three weeks in when the stay-at-home order went into place in April.