No Survivors in Another Plane Crash
Earlier this year, a high-profile plane crash occurred when an American Airlines commercial airliner crashed into an Army Black Hawk helicopter, killing everyone aboard each craft. Since then, a few other deadly crashes have made headlines, and another one occurred this weekend.
Over the weekend, a small private aircraft crashed in upstate New York, killing all six people aboard the plane, including members of a close-knit family of physicians and distinguished student-athletes.
Astatement from the family obtained by the Associated Press identified the victims as Karenna Groff, a former MIT soccer player named the 2022 NCAA woman of the year; her father, a neuroscientist, Dr. Michael Groff; her mother, Dr. Joy Saini, a urogynecologist; her brother, Jared Groff, a 2022 graduate of Swarthmore College who worked as a paralegal; Alexia Couyutas Duarte, Jared Groff’s partner who also graduated Swarthmore and planned to attend Harvard Law School this fall; and Karenna Groff’s boyfriend, James Santoro, another recent MIT graduate.
“They were a wonderful family,” James’ father, John Santoro, told AP. “The world lost a lot of very good people who were going to do a lot of good for the world if they had the opportunity. We’re all personally devastated.”
Shortly before the crash, the pilot had radioed air traffic control at Columbia County Airport, saying that he had missed the initial approach and requested a new approach plan, National Transportation Safety Board officials said on Sunday.
While giving new coordinates to the plane, air traffic controllers attempted to relay a low-altitude alert three times and received no response from the pilot and no distress call.
NTSB official Todd Inman told reporters that the board had received video showing the final seconds of the crash, which “appears to show that the aircraft was intact and crashed at a high rate of descent into the ground."
This comes after there were no survivors in a fiery crash in Boca Raton, Florida, earlier this month, and no survivors in a plane crash in Minnesota last month.
Authorities are still looking into the crash in an investigation that could take up to 24 months.