Three Dead After The Crash Of A Plane Taking Part In A Military Exercise In Florida
Plane crash in Florida, Wednesday night. A civilian aircraft that was playing a supporting role in a military exercise went down, killing all the three persons on board. According to a military source, the victims were working for the company owning the plane, but their identities were not made public. The small Cessna M337B was involved in a military exercise of air control near the Avon Park bombing range, around 90 miles Southeast of Tampa. The exercise was supervised by the Special Operation Forces of the Mac Dill Air Force Base, and the civilians on board were contractors helping out with military ground-to-air communications training.
“The small, fixed-wing aircraft was providing support to a Special Operations Command training exercise. There was no armament on the aircraft or military personnel,” the officials at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa explained in a statement. And the US Special Operations Command spokesman for the base, Major Wes Ticer, explained that authorities sometimes use civilian planes for training when military planes aren’t available to them.
Ticer said the plane took off from the airstrip near Avon Park Air Force bombing range in order to provide communications training for controllers on the ground, as the training is the same regardless of the size of the plane. Fragments of the aircraft were discovered Thursday morning in a wooded area of central Florida and the three bodies were found at the site, announced the local sheriff’s office.
Neigbors living near the field where the plane went down said that they hear a pop prior to the accident. Jesus Beiara told the police that his wife heard the plane crashing and they ran outside, where they saw the smoke from the wreckage. And some other witnesses said they saw the same thing. Immediatelly after the crash, people started calling 911 for help, while the other aircraft taking part in the exercise returned to the airport and reported that it had lost radio contact with the first plane. And when the investigators and the rescue crews arrived at the scene of the crash, they saw the remains of the plane spreading over five acres, as well as limbs and other body parts scattered through the field.
The investigation was taken over by The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), but so far the investigators can not say if there was a mid problem like an explosion or some other problem. Neverthelss, the large area across which the debris has been scattered indicatea violent crash. And as the small plane did not have a black box per se, the investigators hope that other devices such as the GPS might help them and give them clues as to what happened. But itʼs going to be a long investigation which could take 9 to 12 months and its goal is to prevent similar accidents.
And the investigators already have several leads and believe that wheather might have played a key role in the planeʼs crash. The Federal Aviation Administration requested Bay News 9 images from Klystron 9 to see just how bad the weather was and, according to the Bay News 9 meteorologist, images reveal some intense weather cells popping up near the area where the plane crashed and just at the time of the accident.
The NTSB says it will resume the investigation and start talking to the witnesses and the people around the crash scene on Friday, when there is daylight.
