Pilot instructor who jumped out of a plane to his death while giving a lesson ‘had been going through a difficult time,’ his father says

The father of the pilot instructor who committed suicide by jumping out of the plane while teaching his 22-year-old student said that his son was going through a ‘difficult period’.

Leandro Bertazzo, 42, threw himself from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna C-150 after takeoff from Coronel Olmedo Airport near Córdoba in central Argentina on July 4.

He is said to have told the young student he was flying with that day: ‘You know what to do, keep moving forward.’

Bertazzo, who described himself online as a former commercial pilot in Chile, was found dead 20 minutes later in an area the woman had marked as where she might have crashed.

According to Eduardo Alvarez, director of the Flying Parrot Córdoba flight school, where Leandro worked as an instructor for four years, Leandro’s father said his son was going through a “tough time.”

Moreover, according to Alvarez, the man’s family revealed that the man attended a consultation at a psychiatric hospital a week before his death.

According to Para Ti news in Argentina, Bertazzo’s loved ones said he was single, had no children and lived with his parents in the city of Córdoba.

Alvarez said of his employee: ‘He was a consummate professional, always cheerful and greatly admired by all his students.’

The 22-year-old then had to land the Cessna C-150 alone and without assistance at Coronel Olmedo Airport, where he took off and alerted authorities to the emergency.

Emergency services were taken to the area where Mr Bertazzo’s body was found

He added that she was a ‘wonderful person with a great smile and a clear outlook on life’.

Investigators are still investigating his death. According to his boss, Bertazzo ‘took off his headphones, organized his belongings, including his mobile phone, took off his seat belt, opened the door, which was very difficult to open, and jumped out.

‘[The student pilot] ‘He sent a message advising the situation and returned to the runway for landing.’

He added: ‘He was very shaken up but with complete professionalism he flew the plane into the airport and made a perfect landing. ‘He maintained a very high level of training and professionalism.’

Earlier on the day of the incident, Mr Bertazzo had taken another student flying before getting into the cockpit with the 22-year-old student.

He added: ‘He made this tragic decision with one person on the plane.

‘There’s no way to think about it or understand it, but the human mind is so complex, so treacherous. That’s why it happened.’

Authorities said the circumstances surrounding the tragedy were so unusual that they could not offer any explanation at this time as to how this could have happened.

One of the investigations that investigators are thought to be working on is whether the incident was caused by the hatch cover or one of the plane’s security systems.

They check the aircraft’s and the flight school’s documentation and analyze communications that were maintained while the plane was in the air before the instructor crashed.

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