Kerr County pilot will be missed

KERRVILLE, Texas (KXAN) - A crash Saturday afternoon just south of the Llano airport took the lives of two men flying a small aircraft doing touch-and-go practice in the process of flight training.

Scott Belt, 60, of Kerrville,was the instructor who had taken a student, Bobby Luker Jr of
Bertram, 51, for touch and go practice. Belt's small office across the street from the Kerr County Airport, and his friends in the aviation community are mourning the loss of a friend.

"I met him here when I first started working here" said Amy Fry, service manager at Kerrville Aviation. "When I started working the line, fueling airplanes, and Scott was an instructor out here."

Fry said she is surprised to hear about the accident. Belt had over 6,500 hours of flying time and almost 40 years of flying. She said Belt was known as a "safety first" kind of guy with a good sense of humor.

"He was always kinda of a jokester," said Fry. "He liked to make people laugh, I think,and he was always hanging around here."

Friends of Scott Belt said he loved flying, he was always around the airport or at his office right there where he used to spend a lot of time.

Now Belt's two Cessna Skyhawk planes sit just across the street from his office inside the airport grounds. A friend said Belt was flying the client's plane when it crashed, but that teaching students in their own planes is not unusual. What is unusual they say is to hear that Belt perished in a plane accident, given how meticulous he was.

"He's been at this airport for a long time," Fryt said. "He'll definitely be missed."