The past few days have been marked by several aircraft-crash tragedies – with five losing their lives at each of them — accidents made all the more sad because they involved the deaths of children.
Five people, including two juveniles, were killed in Wall Township, in the shore area of New Jersey, Monday afternoon when their Cessna 337 Skymaster broke apart and crashed in a field during an attempted landing, according to The Star-Ledger of Newark.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/nj_airport_crash_kills_five_pe.html
Witnesses said they saw the twin-engine plane, on its approach to Monmouth Executive Airport, break apart before it hit the ground. One part of the plane was found on one of the airport’s runways, while the remainder of the debris was off the runway.
The plane had taken off from the Monmouth airport about 15 minutes before returning and attempting to land, witnesses said.
The crash was even more potentially disturbing because authorities said that family members of the victims were in the airport when the plane crash, although it wasn’t known if they had seen the fatal accident.
Three of the crash victims were related, with a father and son among them. The younger victims, a teenager and a boy, were thrown from the plane.
This weekend a helicopter crash in Cave Creek, north of Phoenix, Ariz., killed five people out in the desert. Originally, only three were believed killed in the crash.
Three of the five victims were related. They were Paradise Valley businessman Thomas Stewart, 64, his wife Madina and their young daughter Sydney, according to the Arizona Republic.
http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/2010/02/15/20100215helicopter-crash-kills-five.html
As is typical in these cases, the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating both crashes. It could take from nine months to a year to pin down a cause of the crash, authorities told The Republic.