Firefighters battle flames after small plane crashed in to a home and damaged others in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Photograph: Reuters
GAITHERSBURG (Maryland): A small, private jet crashed into a house in Maryland's Montgomery County Monday, killing at least three persons on board and a mother and her two young sons inside the home, authorities said.
The jet crashed around 10.45am in Gaithersburg, a Washington, D.C., suburb, Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Chief Steve Lohr said during a news conference.
The plane sliced through the roof of one home, and the main part of the fuselage and the tail landed against a second house. One of the wings "catapulted" into a third house, where the majority of the fire damage occurred, Robert Sumwalt of the National Transportation Safety Board said at a news conference today.
"Our mission is to find out not only what happened but why it happened because we want to make sure something like this never happens again," he said.
The family was found on the second floor of one of the homes.
"We don't know at this point if the cause of death was smoke inhalation or something else," Chief Thomas Manger of the Montgomery County Police said.
Gemmell was lying on top of her young sons in an apparent effort to shield them from the smoke and fire, said police Capt. Paul Starks. Her husband and a school-age daughter were not home and were accounted for, police said.
Health Decisions of Durham, North Carolina said in a news release that Dr. Michael Rosenberg, founder and CEO of the clinical research organization, was among those killed.
Rosenberg was a pilot who crashed a different plane in Gaithersburg on March 1 2010, The Associated Press reported, quoting a government official who wasn't authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be named. Investigators are still trying to determine if Rosenberg was at the controls at the time of Monday's crash.
Fred Pedreira, 67, who lives near the crash site, said he had just returned home from the grocery store and was parking his car when he saw the jet and immediately knew something was wrong.
"This is a tragic loss for the Montgomery County community," Fire Chief Steve Lohr added.
The plane was coming from Chapel Hill, North Carolina and intended to land at the Montgomery County Airpark, Sumwalt said.
Emily Gradwohl, 22, who lives two doors down from the house the jet hit, was home at the time of the crash and ran outside to see what had happened.
"I heard like a loud crash, and the whole house just shook," Gradwohl told The AP. "We got jackets on, ran outside and saw one of the houses completely set on fire."
She said planes fly low over the neighborhood every day but she had never worried about a crash.
The NTSB is conducting an investigation and will look at weather, wreckage, air traffic control, the plane's equipment and more to "gather as much factual information as we can so we can reconstruct this crash." The plane's data recorders have been recovered and are being investigated, he added.
The agency planned to look into everything that could have led to the crash, including crew experience and proficiency, training and procedures, equipment performance, weather and other environmental factors such as birds, Sumwalt said. - AP
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