Photo: Shaban Athuman/The Dallas Morning News vía AP
All those on board a twin-engine plane taking off from Addison Municipal Airport on Sunday died after the aircraft crashed into a hangar and burst into flames, reports say.
“When I left the hangar, I saw the smoke, and I knew there had been an aircraft crash,” Sanger told WFAA. “The fact that this airplane was so close to the ground and departed controlled flight so abruptly — means there has to be something that went seriously wrong — and the pilot had very very little time.”
Among the dead is a family of four: Brian and Ornella Ellard and their two children Alice and Dylan Maritato,according to KXAS. The Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE.
Officials with John Paul II High School in Plano announced the deaths in a letter to families on Monday, saying that Alice was expected to graduate in 2022 and Dylan would have finished eighth grade at All Saints Catholic School in 2020,KXAS reported.
The National Transportation Safety Board has not determined the cause of the crash, and officials said they couldn’t confirm the tail number on the plane because it had recently changed ownership,according to WFAA. Although the plane did not have a black box, it contained electronic recording equipment that could shed light on what happened.
Footage after the crash showed smoke coming from the building and firefighters working to quell the flames. A plane and helicopter in the hangar were damaged, but no one was in the building at the time of the crash,the Associated Press reported.
Audio from an air traffic control tower didn’t indicate that the pilot reported an emergency or trouble with the plane, according to the AP.
“It’s a horrible, sad, shocking thing to lost a family member like this,” Jenkins told the AP. “So we’re doing whatever we can to comfort them.”
“It looked like it was clearly reduced power. I didn’t know if it was on purpose or not, but then, when the plane started to veer to the left and you could tell it couldn’t climb,” Snell said. “My friend and I looked at each other and we’re like, ‘Oh my God. They’re going to crash.’ ”
Snell added: “It all happened over the course of about 10 seconds, and it went from watching an airplane trying to climb and fly, to a huge fireball with debris everywhere. It was really awful.”
The National Transportation Safety Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE.
Several others witnessed the crash and captured video footage of its aftermath.
“He got onto the runway, went down the runway, started taking off,” witness Peter Drake told KDFW. “He got to about 200 feet, and I saw him starting to lose power and his altitude, and then I see him just roll over and came straight down right into the building.”
source: people.com
