'Everything exploded' RV park residents describe crash that killed pilot, woman on ground

NORTH MYRTLE BEACH -- It was a misty midwinter day -- perhaps the only real quiet time in an area that attracts 14 million visitors a year -- when the whining drone of an aircraft engine could be heard low over the trees.

Multiple explosions then shook the Briarcliffe RV Resort as the single-engine plane clipped a tree, smashed into a camping trailer and destroyed a car nearby.

The accident on Tuesday killed a Massachusetts pilot and a woman from New Hampshire on the ground in a trailer.

"It was so low, we knew something desperate was going to happen," said Doreen Boorman, 74, of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, one of thousands of so-called snowbirds who flock to the Carolina coast each year to escape the harsh Northern winters.

"We looked out the window, saw the crash and everything exploded," whose trailer was about 30 yards from where the crash scene.

"It sounded like a NASCAR car and then, in a split second ..." said Carson Hackney, 72, of French Lick, Ind.

The pilot was identified as 62-year-old Kenneth Thode of Plymouth, Mass., who authorities said was practicing takeoffs and landings at an airport about a mile away. The woman was identified as 70-year-old Eva Sullivan of Sunapee, N.H.

Both Thode and Sullivan were snowbirds. Friends said Sullivan was an expert quilter whose arrived earlier this month with her husband, Thomas, who suffered burns and was hospitalized.

Thode had a vacation home in the area and sometimes flew his plane, a 2004 single-engine Cessna, from Plymouth to South Carolina, said Bill Leppert, a local flight instructor who flew with Thode in the past.

"He was practicing approaches and everything seemed to be fine," Leppert said. "He had his pilot's license for at least four or five years."

The Sullivans were inside their trailer at the time.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are expected to be on the scene for several days.

On Wednesday, they sifted through twisted metal while the plane engine was being hoisted by a crane.

It's the second time in a year someone has died on the ground in a plane crash in South Carolina.

A man was killed last March on Hilton Head Island as a plane tried to make an emergency landing on the beach.