Emergency units were dispatched to 165 Mildred Elliott Road in Dawsonville, Georgia, around noon on Sunday, August 9. The call was that a small plane had gone down on a private airstrip owned by NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott.
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There were two men on board. Reportedly, one of them managed to escape. The other couldn’t.
First responder radio traffic, as per Broadcastify, captured the scene as it unfolded, and the transmission was shared by accounts on social media.
“One small aircraft, completely destroyed on the ground. We’ve got one critical on the ground. One entrapped in the airplane, currently one out,” Lieutenant 8 reported on arrival.
First responders arrived to find the aircraft destroyed. Lieutenant 8 called it in straight: one critical on the ground, one still trapped inside. Dawson County fire crews worked to pull the second man out of the wreckage. Early dispatch flagged a possible broken leg.
Both passengers, middle-aged males, were later confirmed with multi-system trauma. A family member posted an update saying one of them had a broken jaw but was coherent and getting CT scans done.
Bill Elliott was not on the plane. Neither was his son Chase, who was in Iowa that weekend for the Iowa Corn 350. Bill spoke to local media from the ground. According to him, the plane lost its motor mid-flight and came straight down at the facility.
The Dawson County Sheriff’s Office placed the crash near State Route 183 at around noon. Fire Chief Troy Leist led the on-ground response. By mid-afternoon, the NTSB had taken over the investigation.
The location did not help matters. Elliott Field is boxed in by 40-foot Georgia pine trees, with a road crossing right at the end of the approach. Lose an engine over that terrain, and there is nowhere clean to put a plane down. Witnesses on Mildred Elliott Road heard the motor cut out, saw it go down, and called it in. The facility has no control tower, so there was no one else to make that call.
Elliott Field, FAA identifier 09GE, is not a commercial airport. Bill Elliott built it himself about 40 years ago, right behind his house off Elliott Family Parkway. The airfield has been on the city of Dawsonville’s radar for a while. Local government has been pushing to buy the property from Elliott and turn it into a public general aviation airport. That conversation was already happening before Sunday.
As of Sunday afternoon, the NTSB investigation was underway. The full conditions of both men beyond the initial trauma reports had not been officially released.