Investigators are trying to determine what caused a small aircraft to crash Monday afternoon in a Muskogee neighborhood.

Pilot Ronald Dickey, 59, of Williston, Tenn., was the only fatality. A spokesperson for the Tulsa Medical Examiner’s Office said the cause of death was blunt force trauma.

The Federal Aviation Administration is doing on-scene documentation and will then turn over their data to the National Transportation and Safety Board.

Dickey was flying a “kit plane” called an RV6-A that his wife Beverly said he built in his garage.

Roland Herwig, spokesman for the FAA, said no new details of this accident were immediately available, but he described their procedure.

“We go to the scene if it warrants going to the accident scene, we investigate all aspects of the accident meaning the paperwork, the pilot, air traffic control if it was involved,” he said. “On the aircraft, sometimes the manufacturer gets involved, sometimes parts are sent off to various laboratories around the country for analysis. As far as the airman is concerned, there might be DNA checks for the presence of certain compounds, and of course a lot of interviews with local people if there are any that saw the event.”

One unanswered question is whether it was equipped with a flight recorder that might reveal the cause of the accident. Tom Green, president of Van’s Aircraft, the manufacturer of the RV-6A, doesn’t think so.

“I’m going to say no, but I can’t prove that because we don’t sell that,” he said. “We sell an air frame kit not an airplane kit, and it’s a little different in the sense that we sell them the metal to build the wings, the tail and the fuselage. But as far as instrumentation or the engine or the propellor, that’s all supplied by the kit builder, whoever buys the plane.”

Green said the crashed plane was bought quite some time ago and had been flying since then.

“Flight recorders are not even existent in light aircraft until the last few years that people can have them,” he said. “It’s not like going on a 737. The only way that there are recorders nowadays is by happenstance, in that some of the most modern equipment people buy, including radios, have a short memory that’s internal. It can sometimes be accessed, but it’s very unlikely that plane would have that.”