A medical plane crashed in Pennsylvania on Friday just moments after it had taken off from the Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The Jet Rescue Air Ambulance reportedly hit a gas line when it crashed in the Castor Gardens neighborhood, killing all six people onboard and one person on the ground.
The medical plane had stopped off at Northeast Philadelphia Airport on Friday and was scheduled to fly to Springfield, Missouri, at 6:06 p.m. Onboard the Learjet 55 medical plane was a recently released Shriners Children’s Hospital patient, her mother and four crew members, reports CBS News.
Less than a minute after taking off, the plane crashed into the Castor Gardens neighborhood to the northeast of Philadelphia. When the plane crashed, it reportedly hit a gas line before exploding, killing everyone onboard and one person on the ground:
A GPS collected data indicating that the jet climbed about 1,500 feet into the air before taking a slight right turn, followed by a slight left turn, and then a steep descent before the plane crashed, officials said.
The entire flight was less than one minute.
The chairman of the NTSB said Air Traffic Control tried communicating with the crew before the crash but never received a response.
Authorities have not yet identified any of the victims in the crash, but the president of Mexico has confirmed that the six people onboard the plane were all Mexican citizens. The passengers included a pediatric patient who had just concluded treatment at a hospital in the U.S.
A seventh person killed in the crash was reportedly in a car near the crash site when the plane came down.
It’s not yet known what led to the crash, but investigators are combing through the debris for any clues as to what might have happened. Experts from the Federal Aviation Administration are collecting fragments from the plane across an area that “extends over four to five blocks,” and transporting them to a safe facility where they can be analyzed. Investigators have also recovered the black box recorder for the Learjet 55 aircraft, as the Independent explains:
The device was found eight feet underground at the crash site near the Roosevelt Mall, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday evening. The black box – also known as a cockpit voice recorder – remained in “decent shape,” sources told WPVI.
The black box recorder will reveal what was said inside the cockpit in the moments leading up the crash. Data stored in the device could also offer an insight into what could have gone wrong.
Authorities have also recovered two engines from the plane and its enhanced ground proximity warning system, which could contain flight data and offer further insights into what went wrong.
The crash in Pennsylvania comes just days after another U.S. airline disaster occurred when an American Airlines plane collided with a military helicopter in the skies above Washington. The American Airlines jet was preparing to land when the collision happened.
