Credit: Twitter
The daughter of offensive lineman Bruce Collie, a two-time Super Bowl champion, was among the four persons killed in two separate crashes during an airshow in Wisconsin over the weekend, just days after she and her husband celebrated their third wedding anniversary.
Reports state that five minutes after takeoff on Saturday at around 9 a.m., Devyn Reiley, Collie's daughter, and her co-pilot Zach Colliemoreno, 20, were flying a World War II-era T-6 Texan during the AirVenture Oshkosh airshow.
The vintage plane descended into the lake from a height of 3,900 feet. Witnesses to the horrific accident claimed that the plane was violently whirling as it descended before colliding into the lake. The US Coast Guard started searching the lake that afternoon, and divers found both pilots' deaths that night, according to a tweet from the branch.
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The cause of the initial plane crash is the subject of an investigation. Around 12:30 p.m. that same day, an ELA 10 Eclipse gyrocopter and a RotorWay162F helicopter collided in midair, resulting in a second catastrophe close to the airshow. Both the helicopter's 69-year-old pilot Mark Peterson and his 72-year-old passenger Thomas Volz perished. A gyrocopter looks like a tiny helicopter, except it has a propeller on the back.
On July 26, the couple had just commemorated their third wedding anniversary. “All you wanted was to make the wasp proud. You earned your ‘Fifi’ wings,” Hunter wrote in a heartfelt Facebook post for his wife. Everyone looked up to her since she was the older sister, Calyn Collie, 21, told the San Antonio Express. Her passion for flying was obvious even as a young child.
During World War II, a group of civilian women pilots called the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) was established to support the war effort. Reiley, the oldest of the 13 children born to former San Francisco 49er Bruce Collie, was "enchanted" with flying, according to her younger sister. According to the Texas Warbird Museum, a nonprofit she co-founded with her husband and family to preserve decommissioned WWII-era military aircraft, Reiley earned her private pilot's license in 2017, with the goal of earning her commercial pilot's license.
Bruce Collie was selected by the Niners in the 1985 NFL Draft. He played offensive guard and helped the team to two Super Bowl victories in 1989 and 1990 before being traded to the Eagles and retiring in 1991.
