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Mostly Cloudy Long Beach aviator ‘was always on an adventure’
Plane crash victim Patrick Sheridan remembered by family and friends
Hundreds of people turned out on Tuesday morning to say goodbye to Patrick Sheridan, a Long Beach resident and Farmingdale State College aviation student who died in a plane crash on May 9, at age 34.
“These are my aunt Rose’s words: Patrick has left us too soon,” said Sheridan’s cousin Doreen Cooper, referring to Patrick’s mother, Rosemary. “He had a dream to become a pilot, which he did accomplish. He left us doing what he loved best — flying.”
According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the crash occurred shortly after 10:30 p.m. last Wednesday. After taking off from Spring Hill Airport in Sterling, Pa., the plane, a four-seat, single-engine Mooney M20J with Sheridan at the controls, crashed in Wayne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania. Sheridan and Casey Falconer, 19, of Garden City Park, were killed and a third passenger, Evan Kisseloff, 21, of Oceanside, was injured but survived. Kisseloff took part in Farmingdale’s commencement ceremony last Saturday, which honored the two dead students.
“As far as the campus mood, there have been a lot of tears here,” Patrick Calabria, Farmingdale’s vice president for institutional advancement, said last Friday. “We’re devastated — especially students in the aviation program who knew the students who were killed … I didn’t know Patrick personally, but I’m told he just loved flying, that it was his dream.”
The flight the students took was not associated with any college program, the school said. They were apparently on their way to visit Falconer’s family in Pennsylvania. Sheridan was a licensed pilot.
According to Peter Knudson, a spokesman for the NTSB, the agency is investigating the accident. A preliminary report was expected to be made available on the NTSB website this week, but it will be a year before a final report is released, Knudson said.
The plane was registered to Sheridan Air LLC, which lists Sheridan as the owner and an address on Tennessee Avenue in Long Beach, where his mother lives. According to his Facebook profile, Sheridan was a 1996 graduate of Long Beach High School and attended Nassau Community College. He founded Sheridan Air last May, and was a senior at SUNY Farmingdale.
