ROY — An executive from the company that owns the airplane that crashed into a Roy neighborhood last week reports that the people who were on board at the time of the accident are doing well.

Martin O’Loughlin — president and COO at Cornerstone Aviation, a flight school also known as CSA — told the Standard-Examiner that a male pilot/instructor and a female student were injured in the crash. Their identities were not provided, but O’Loughlin says that both are now out of the hospital.

“The student got a gash on her chin and another little cut on her ear and that was it,” O’Loughlin said Monday. “She got stitched up and she was released within a couple of hours.”

While the pilot’s injuries were more serious, according to O’Loughlin, it also was indicated that he would be back at work relatively soon and could be flying again in six weeks.

“My instructor broke one vertebra in his back, so they they kept him and then they did surgery to stabilize the vertebra so it wouldn’t affect his spinal cord,” O’Loughlin said. “The surgery was successful and he was released from the hospital (Sunday).”

The cause of the crash, which occurred on the afternoon of July 24, currently is being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board and also internally by CSA.

During the crash landing, the aircraft — a Piper PA-34-220T Seneca III manufactured in 1981 and owned by CSA — struck a tree, resulting in significant damage to one house, before its progress was halted by trees in the front yard of a second house.

No one on the ground was injured as a result of the crash. O’Loughlin says he personally contacted the families whose homes were involved in the accident, one of which was displaced by the crash.

O’Loughlin further noted that all of CSA’s aircraft, including the Seneca III involved in the crash, undergo regular and rigorous examination and maintenance to determine airworthiness.

“Every 100 hours of use, they get completely taken apart and we put about 20 to 30 labor hours into inspecting the airplanes,” he said. “In the summertime it only takes about five weeks to put 100 hours on an airplane. So, what this means is every five to six weeks, we’re taking an airplane off the line, disassembling it, inspecting it in accordance with checklists and putting it back together.”

Speculation about the plane having run out of fuel before crashing is false, according to O’Loughlin. Conversation between the pilot and air traffic control, of which audio logs are publicly available online, indicated that the aircraft held “40 gallons” of fuel, equating to “two hours of flight remaining,” in the moments before the crash.

Regardless of what might have led to the accident, O’Loughlin described having one of CSA’s planes go down as a harrowing experience for everyone involved given the company’s myriad FAA certifications, the continual maintenance of aircraft and ongoing efforts to make their operation — and those of Ogden-Hinckley Airport at large — as safe as possible.

“It’s just a heartbreak for me that we have all these great things in place and then we would suffer some bad luck,” he said. “We’ll do our own (investigation) to try to identify the cause and make sure we can keep it from happening again. But, the one thing I can assure you is that it was not due to any sort of irresponsibility.”

O’Loughlin went on to praise the work of the pilot in the situation.

“He’s one of our most experienced pilots and he was calm. You can hear it in his voice on the radio,” O’Loughlin said. “According to his student, he was calm and decisive and knew exactly what he was going to try to not create more damage on the ground. And he executed it.”