Four people lost their lives in two separate plane crashes over the course of the weekend in Wisconsin. One of the victims was Devyn Reiley, the daughter of two-time Super Bowl champion offensive lineman Bruce Collie.
Devyn Reiley: Who was he?
The 30-year-old pilot Devyn Reiley is the descendant of Super Bowl champion Bruce Collie. She ran a flight training academy in Texas and was Collie’s eldest of 13 children.
Devyn was pursuing a career as a commercial airline pilot with the goal of flying refuelers. She had been accepted into the Air Force reserves. The aircraft climbed to a height of 3,900 feet above the ground in just five minutes after takeoff.
At the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh air show, she perished when her aircraft crashed. Witnesses claimed to have seen the plane spiraling downward prior to the catastrophic collision.
On July 30, at around nine in the morning, Devyn’s WWII T-6 Texan airplane crashed in Wisconsin into Lake Winnebago. Her co-pilot, Zach Colliemoreno, was 20 years old and also perished.
Devyn and her husband Hunter had just celebrated their third wedding anniversary a few days before she passed away. At an aviation convention in Oshkosh, she first met her husband, and on July 27, they celebrated their wedding anniversary there. To commemorate their anniversary, Reiley wrote on July 26: “Here’s to living and chasing our dreams together for many more years to come with my best friend by my side.”
Hunter wrote on his blog following the unfortunate incident, “All you wanted was to make the wasp proud. Your ‘Fifi’ wings are well deserved. He wrote in a different post, “I love and miss you, Devyn Reiley.”
Just after noon, a second incident took place at a nearby airfield near the location of the airshow. When a gyrocopter struck Mark Peterson, a 69-year-old instructor, and engineer from Alabama, from below, the helicopter crashed in flames. Thomas Volz, Peterson’s 72-year-old passenger, also perished in the incident.
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