By JEFF LAMPE and COLLIN FAIRFIELD
For The Weekly Post
PRINCEVILLE – For much of Saturday afternoon, people dressed in red and white or maroon and white streamed into the new Princeville gymnasium. To an outsider, it could have looked like they were arriving for a basketball game. Unfortunately, this gathering was much more somber. Members of the Princeville and Bradley University communities were showing up to pay their respects to the late Mitchell Janssen, 22, who died with two others in a plane crash on March 4 in Logan County. A standout three-sport athlete at Princeville High School and an all-Missouri Valley Conference pitcher at Bradley, Janssen’s visitation drew large numbers of friends from both schools who remembered him as a standout athlete and a fine teammate.
Many expressed shock at the death of Janssen, who was piloting a four-seat, single-engine Cessna 172 last Tuesday morning and attempted to make an emergency landing on Interstate 55. The Illinois State Police reported that the plane became fully engulfed on impact with the interstate, which was shut down for several hours after the crash. With Janssen in the plane were Matthew Hanson, 33, of Pulaski, Wis., and Kevin Chapman, 30, of Urbana.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash but has not released information about the cause of the crash or where the plane was going after its takeoff from Central Illinois Regional Airport in Bloomington. An investigation could take up to a year, officials say.
The Bloomington airport was one of several where Janssen had chased his dream to become a pilot. In addition to hundreds of hours of flight training, he had worked his last two years of college as a commercial charter jet pilot and purchased his own plane in 2018. That passion started in second grade, Janssen told Bob Grimson in a 2018 story in Bradley’s Hilltopics magazine.
“You’re never going to see the same thing twice. You always notice something different,” Janssen said, explaining his passion for flying. “You see these cool sunsets and sunrises. When we’re flying to Colorado you get to see the mountains up close and from a different perspective.”
As a charter pilot, Janssen was able to pilot for the likes of actor Donnie Wahlberg and others. More recently, he had been hired as a pilot for Air Wisconsin and was working as a flight instructor for Synergy Flight Center in Bloomington. That he died doing what he loved was fitting, his mother Stephanie Janssen told WEEK 25 News. “He wouldn’t have wanted to go any other way … I wouldn’t have changed anything, I would have still promoted the flying, I wouldn’t have tried to turn him to anything else.”
He is survived by his father, Steve, and brother, Justin.
