Flowers left by family members rest by the wreckage of the single-engine aircraft that crashed Thursday evening in Newport.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

MIDDLETOWN — The police yesterday identified the man pulled from a burning plane which crashed just after takeoff from Newport State Airport on Thursday. Officials are still trying to identify the two people who died in the crash.

Keith Ulich, 28, of Newport, was listed in critical condition yesterday at Rhode Island Hospital, where he was taken Thursday night after being pulled from the crash. Dental records must be used to identify the other two victims, officials said, and the long holiday weekend is slowing that process.

“Due to the condition of the bodies, the medical examiner is having a hard time positively identifying the bodies,” said Lt. Scott Hemingway of the Rhode Island State Police. “We’re having some difficulty getting the records, and it would be inappropriate to assume we have the right identity unless it has been confirmed.”

Around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, a single-engine Piper aircraft carrying three people crashed in a clump of bushes near a field in a neighborhood about 700 feet from the airport’s runway. Eyewitnesses said they saw two men pulling Ulich from the smoking plane just before it burst into flames. No houses were damaged and no people on the ground injured.

Yesterday, officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board began what officials said will be a months-long investigation into what caused the crash.

“This is Day 1 of an investigation that usually runs 180 to 360 days,” said Robert Gretz, a senior air safety investigator. “We’re in the fact-finding stage. And we’re mostly concentrating on documenting the scene…”

Gretz said that by July 18, the NTSB will release a preliminary report, and later, a full report of the information compiled by investigators. The report will be used to determine a probable cause for the crash.

“We’re going to look at the man, the machine and the environment,” Gretz said, saying investigators would look at the pilot’s experience, the aircraft’s maintenance history and the weather conditions at the time.

The plane lost power immediately after takeoff, James Warcup, chief aeronautics inspector with the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, said Thursday night.

Officials spent much of yesterday coordinating the investigation to come, Gretz said. They contacted the owner and the insurance companies, found maintenance and fuel records for the aircraft, and worked with the team of investigators who will be going through the wreckage over the next few days, he said. The 1977 Piper fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft is registered to Charles Hallal of Westport, Mass. Gretz said Hallal was not on the plane during the crash and had allowed a flight instructor to use it under conditions of a business relationship.

So far, officials are still unsure why the passengers were in the plane Thursday night. Gretz said that there was a flight instructor, a student and someone with a relationship to the student in the plane when it crashed. However, the instructor was in the pilot’s seat, and the student was in the traditional instruction seat on the right side of the plane. The FAA lists a Keith Thomas Ulich as a student pilot.

“We don’t know, especially with a friend on board, if this was an instructional or a pleasure flight. They could have said ‘hey, for this one day, we’re not going to do instruction. Let’s just go out and enjoy the view.’ We just don’t know what they were doing.”

Just before noon, family members of the victims came to view the wreckage. Members of the group cried and hugged alongside the road before venturing to the site and laying a small bouquet of red flowers at the edge of the scene. They declined requests for comment. All that remained was the frame of the aircraft and the right wing, which was still recognizable.

As inspectors worked, spectators wandered down Sunrise Terrace to see the wreckage. Drivers on Forest Avenue crept past the five orange cones marking the street where the site lies, glancing at the charred plane from afar.

Sean Curran, of Middletown, came by the site with his girlfriend’s 10-year-old son, Ross Monroe, and his friend, Chris Budihas, to see what a plane crash looked like.

“You can see where the plane went down,” said Budihas, 11, as he stood near the entrance to Sunrise Terrace.

“It looks like the wing was ripped off,” Monroe said.

Curran said he lived on Forest Avenue for six years and just finished moving into a new home. The trio stopped by on their way to a cookout.

“We always said, ‘What if someone crashed? It would be right on top of our house since we live so close,’” Curran said yesterday. “It’s eerie that the night we moved, this happened.”

The last crash at the airport was in 2001, when a Newport couple died because the cowling of the aircraft’s engine compartment was open during the flight.

tbuford@projo.com