Flight instructor jumped midair to his death, left student to land the plane

High in the skies over Argentina, a flight instructor at the controls of a Cessna 150 suddenly turned to his student and reportedly said, “You know what you have to do, carry on.”

Then he took off his headset, unbuckled his seatbelt, shoved open the door, and jumped out of the plane, the Argentinian news outlet TN reported.

The 22-year-old student, identified in the news account only as Rosario, already had a pilot’s license and was able to safely land the aircraft.

The incident is now under investigation by the Federal Court of Córdoba, Argentina, and the plane has been impounded, NBC News has confirmed.

Authorities have not yet revealed why 42-year-old Leandro Andrés Bertazzo leaped to his death Saturday from the Cessna.

Eduardo Álvarez, director of the Flying Parrot Córdoba flying school where Bertazzo worked, told TN they only recently learned that the flight instructor had been under psychiatric care and that he had no clue Bertazzo was planning to kill himself.

In fact, Álvarez said, Bertazzo had gone on a training flight with another student earlier that day.

“He made this tragic decision aboard an aircraft with one other person by his side,” Álvarez said in the interview. “There’s no way to think about it or understand it, but the human mind is so complex, so treacherous.”

As for the student pilot, Álvarez said she was “very clear, decisive, mature, and professional.”

“She was very shaken, but with complete professionalism, she piloted the plane to the airfield and landed perfectly,” he said. “She maintained a very high level of training and professionalism.”

Bertazzo had worked at Flying Parrot Córdoba for a decade and was a licensed commercial pilot, his former boss said. He had also worked for a time in neighboring Chile.

On Saturday, according to the TN account, Bertazzo arrived that the school in the Córdoba suburb of Coronel Olmedo. He greeted his coworkers and then set off on the first training flight of the day, which went smoothly.

The second flight on his schedule was with Rosario, who has a pilot’s license but had not logged enough flying hours to pilot a plane by herself.

It was while flying over a mostly rural area called Toledo that Bertazzo suddenly shoved open the plane door — a maneuver Álvarez likened to opening the door of a car traveling 124 miles per hour.

Álvarez said that after the student successfully landed the Cessna he took off to look for Bertazzo’s body. After spotting it from the sky, he said he radioed officers from the Central Rural Patrol the coordinates and they found his remains.

Bertazzo was “a beautiful person with a great smile,” said Álvarez. “We are surprised that this has happened.”

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