Police

Family: Crash victim was sweet man ‘crazed about planes’

Zubair Khan during the first taxiing of his plane at Brookhaven Calabro Airport in February. (Credit: YouTube)
Zubair Khan during the first taxiing of his plane at Brookhaven Calabro Airport in February. (Credit: YouTube)

Mr. Khan began his project at the Sullivan County Airport in Bethel, N.Y., in February 2012, but the airport superintendent there, Mike Mullen, said airport records show he moved his plane to Shirley six months later.

Marc Zeitlin of Tehachapi, Calif., an aircraft engineer who had advised Mr. Khan, said he made the transition to Long Island so he could be at an airport with more aviators working on similar projects. CoZys are planes built by individuals using blueprints.

Mr. Zeitlin, an MIT graduate who consults on projects around the globe, estimates there are fewer than 4,000 CoZy planes flying in the U.S. today. He said there are probably 300 to 400 of the type of four-seat CoZy plane Mr. Khan was flying.

NTSB records show there have been only seven other fatal CoZy crashes in the U.S. in the past 20 years. The most recent was recorded two years ago this week in Winslow, Ariz.

Mr. Zeitlin admits he was one of the aviators who was initially skeptical of a man with Mr. Khan’s limited experience taking on an aircraft project of this magnitude. But over the past two years, he said, he grew to respect Mr. Khan as someone who was “diligent about [working] safely and doing it right.”

“He did a tremendous amount of work over the past two years,” said Mr. Zeitlin, who visits New York on a regular basis and had inspected Mr. Khan’s plane in its hangar in Shirley. “I gave him a lot of credit.”

Mr. Zeitlin said he spoke with Mr. Khan in June, and while he reported several hiccups during his test flights over the past four months, their was nothing unusual about the flights.

“He had some minor issues, nothing big,” he said. “That’s always the case.”

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Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story said Mr. Khan was from Afghanistan. A family member later commented that “he belonged to Bannu and then later settled at Peshawar in Pakistan.” We regret the error.