LAKE PLACID – The National Transportation Safety Board said pilot error was the cause of a fatal plane crash last summer.

The NTSB said the “pilot’s failure to maintain adequate airspeed for the airplane’s configuration” led to the plane stalling and crashing July 19, 2014, alongside River Road near the Lake Placid Airport. Three people died.

The crash killed Fred Kafka, the 63-year-old pilot, along with his daughter Kathleen Kafka, 24, and her friend Reed Phillips, 25. Both Kathleen Kafka, of Canton, and Phillips, from Midland, Michigan, were students at Clarkson University in Potsdam.

Kafka left his hometown airport in the city of Vienna, West Virginia, the day before the crash to spend time with his daughter in Potsdam. He traveled in his Mooney M20F aircraft. The daughter invited her friend Phillips along on the sightseeing trip that took them by air to Lake Placid.

Although the NTSB faulted Kafka, his landing at the airport was complicated by another pilot trying to land at the same time on the 4,196-foot-long runway. As both Kafka and the local pilot approached the runway from opposite directions, “they looked as though they saw each other and started to each climb to their right sides,” a witness told NTSB investigators.

“He started a shallow turn to the right and started to climb along the right side of the runway,” the witness reportedly said.

After the first attempt, both planes circled to try to land again.

The witness on the ground “then heard the Mooney pilot transmit something over the radio; he couldn’t recall what it was, but that it sounded angry, followed later by his transmitting in a calmer voice, ‘I will follow you in,'” the report states.

The airport witness then described that the Mooney’s landing gear was down and the airplane was slowly gaining altitude at “a steeper than normal angle.” The plane’s nose then “dropped,” sending it into a counter-clockwise spin downward. The witness told the NTSB it dropped “so fast it didn’t even make a complete turn before it went out of sight.”

The local pilot who was in the air that day told the NTSB he never heard or saw any airplane traffic at the airport before his attempted landing. The pilot had his radio set to the airport’s local frequency.

The Lake Placid Airport does not have a control tower, so pilots must communicate with each other by radio.

The skies were clear that day, which the NTSB noted in its report. After an autopsy at Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake, the pilot’s health was also ruled not to be a factor.

According to the Detroit News, Phillips’ friends and family members created a scholarship in his memory.