A plane similar to Sparky Imeson’s Cessna 180 was flying as low as 30 feet above the ground shortly before Imeson’s plane crashed in Montana on March 17, a witness told the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB’s preliminary report into the crash that killed the well known mountain pilot provided few new details about what happened. Imeson, 64, was reportedly flying over a small airport near Townsend, Mont., where he was involved in a 2007 crash that seriously injured him. The witness described seeing a high-wing plane flying fast and low near a set of power lines, then pitching up and turning around 180 degrees. The witness did not see the plane crash, so it’s not clear whether that plane was in fact Imeson’s.

The FAA is taking a close look at the maintenance program at a flight school in California’s Central Valley whose planes were involved in two emergency landings in recent months. Two of the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics’ planes experienced engine failures within a three-week period in January and February, the Modesto Bee reported. In October, the flight school got a warning from the FAA because it hadn’t been making required 100-hour inspections. Sierra has a history of warnings before that, including $3,500 worth of maintenance-related fines prior to 2002 and warnings in recent years for keeping improper repair records and allowing planes that weren’t airworthy to fly. Sierra has 51 planes and caters mainly to students from China who come to the United States for flight training and then return to China to work for airlines there. Sierra is based at Castle Airport, about 100 miles southeast of Sacramento. That’s the same airport where another operator shut down in June after it didn’t pay its water bills and its students, most of whom were from India, were evicted.

A Tuscon, Ariz., school district renewed its contract with a local flight school that gives lessons to high school students, even after the district found out the flight school had paid nearly $45,000 in fines to the FAA. The flight school made faulty repairs on several Cessnas used in flight training and performed maintenance on a helicopter that it wasn’t qualified to do, <a href=”http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/275394″>the Arizona Star reported</a>. The school’s owner made several repairs using tape, the FAA said. The flight school’s owner downplayed the problems, calling them mistakes in paperwork. But the FAA said the problems were serious enough to warrant suspending the owner’s maintenance certificate for four months. The school district said it doesn’t require contractors, such as the flight school, to report past problems and said it had heard few complaints about the flight school. But staffers said they had concerns with how the flight school handled billing and repair issues in the past. The $115,000 contract pays for just 10 high school seniors each year to receive their flight training at no charge to students or parents; few of those students go on to become professional pilots.