WEST GARDINER – Pilot Jeannette Symons may have skipped a federally mandated physical examination and a required safety course before the Feb. 1 airplane crash in which she and her young son died.

Not fulfilling those requirements means West Gardiner fire personnel may not be able to recoup thousands of dollars spent during the emergency response to the downed flight.

Symons’ insurance carrier, Arch Insurance Company, recently notified West Gardiner fire Chief Ken Stackpole that Symons’ insurance policy could be void.

Stackpole said his department had filed a $51,000 claim to pay for the emergency response to the crash of Symons’ six-seater Cessna jet. That includes paying equipment costs for other agencies and $32,000 of claims for the West Gardiner department.

In the letter, the insurance company says that it can find no documentation that Symons had completed a physical or taken the annual flight safety class.

“Either of those would be enough to invalidate her insurance policy,” Stackpole said. “It doesn’t mean that her estate doesn’t have that proof, just that they can’t find it.”

The insurance company referred questions to Symons’ estate, in San Francisco.

Symons was a telecommunications and Internet entrepreneur, considered one of the wealthiest women in the United States. Her oldest child, 10-year-old Balan, was killed in the flight as well.

Symons had just taken off from the Augusta State Airport on Feb. 1, bound for Lincoln, Neb. Snow and sleet were falling that night and another plane scheduled to take off had canceled its flight due to the weather, according to the National Transportation and Safety Board’s preliminary report filed in February. Ice coated vehicles in the airport parking lot and light snow had turned to freezing rain.

Air-traffic controllers in Portland said Symons reported an on-board emergency involving one of the three indicators that tell a pilot whether the plane is level relative to the horizon. She reported having instrument trouble and did not know where she was turning, according to the report.

The Cessna Citation went down moments later in the woods of West Gardiner, approximately six miles south-southwest of the airport.

Stackpole said his department will continue talking with the Symons estate.

“We’re hoping to settle this without having to file a lawsuit,” he said.