Small plane traveling from Tennessee to Long Island crashes in Virginia, 4 dead
RONKONKOMA, N.Y. -- The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed four people died after an unresponsive airplane flew over Washington D.C. and crashed in rural Virginia on Sunday.
The plane, which originated in Tennessee, was originally scheduled to land on Long Island.
The FAA says the pilot and three passengers were killed and the plane was destroyed. Its path over D.C. prompted the military to scramble several fighter jets.
CBS News has learned that one of the fighter pilots saw the Cessna pilot slumped over and unresponsive.
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New video shows the site of the crash, where investigators are searching the wreckage and trying to piece together what happened.
Air traffic audio captured the moment the military scrambled fighter jets from multiple locations, including Atlantic City, to intercept the unresponsive flight after it flew through restricted airspace above our nation's capital.
The scramble caused a loud sonic boom that rattled people in the D.C. area.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday evening it took investigators more than three hours to reach the remote Virginia crash site in a wooded area.
"That'll absolutely be a part of this investigation of looking at when the pilot became unresponsive, and why the airplane flew the flight track it did fly," NTSB investigator Adam Gerhardt said. "The wreckage is destroyed, meaning it is no longer distinguishable as an aircraft, but there are still several pieces that may be able to assist the fact-finding stage at this point."
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The FAA says the plane was a Cessna Model 560. It was headed from a municipal airport in Tennessee to Long Island's MacArthur Airport, where it reversed course and flew over the prohibited airspace.
"It has all the signatures of some sort of incapacitation," said Robert Sumwalt, CBS News safety analyst and former NTSB chairman. "Whether it is an actual medical incapacitation on behalf of the pilot, or perhaps a hypoxia event, due to the airplane not pressurizing properly. We are here not only to figure out what happened but why this happened. We want to prevent future accidents from happening again."
The NTSB says it will be at the site investigating for at least three to four days. The wreckage will be sent to a secure facility in Delaware for further investigation.