Images of the wreckage of a Challenger 300 plane after it crashed while landing in the city of San Fernando, Buenos Aires province. The pilot and co-pilot died after the private plane crashed and caught fire near the San Fernando airport. The plane was flying from the exclusive resort of Punta del Este in Uruguay and “failed to brake” on landing, Carlos Armentano, a spokesman for Aeropuertos Argentina, the company that runs the airport, told AFP. No other injuries were reported.
Tracking the plane’s tail number, N823KD, the flight, a Bombardier Challenger 600, appeared to have been headed to the Naples Airport from Ohio State Executive Airport, according to FlightAware.
Two of the pilots told WINK News that this must have been a freak accident.
One of the pilots who works with Jet One, a charter company in our area, said that the pilots would have had seconds, not minutes, to make a decision. That’s because they were at a low altitude and also not traveling with much speed.
The other pilot, who also flies a Challenger plane, said that these planes are pretty reliable. She’s in disbelief that this happened.
She also said she received messages from people who use planes like these who said that they are now nervous to get on one.
Another pilot told WINK what it was like to see this all unfold from the sky.
Dakota said he had been listening to the same radio frequency that the plane that crashed on I-75 was for about 10 minutes as he and his dad were making their way back to Naples in a small plane.
But as they were getting ready to land, air traffic control asked them to turn around, and shortly after that, the first may-day call came in from the pilot, saying he needed to do an emergency landing.
“Right away, the ATC came back and said, ‘Clear to land runway 23,’ and he instantly said, ‘I’m not going to make it.’ It probably was maybe 30 seconds max before I heard that call to when I saw an explosion. After that, everyone got real quiet.”
Dakota said he thinks the pilot made the right decision, choosing to crash land on I-75. He said it all happened so fast that he didn’t really have another option, but this was the safest.
The crash happened sometime between 3:12 and 3:15 p.m., Friday.
The airport is located about three miles from the crash scene.
Air traffic is continuing as scheduled.