PHILADELPHIA — The impact area where a medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia was notably “expansive,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Monday after viewing the site with investigators and city officials.
Duffy said he was struck by “how expansive it was. And the issues that fire and police were dealing with. Again, this is a very populated area.”
The crash Friday evening killed all six people on the Learjet 55 air ambulance, including a girl who had been receiving medical treatment at Shriners Children’s Philadelphia hospital. A seventh person inside a vehicle was killed on the ground.
Mayor Cherelle Parker said two more people who were hurt on the ground have been identified, bringing the total to 24. Four people remained hospitalized Monday, two in critical condition.
Parker said footage of the crash has made her “think about what could have been, had a gas line been hit.”
The air ambulance was taking Valentina Guzmán Murillo and her mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, home to Mexico. It plummeted within a minute of taking off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport.
Debris from the crash exploded into a fireball, and pieces of the plane were blown into the residential and commercial Castor Gardens neighborhood, severely damaging several businesses and at least 11 homes.
“It was a very steep angle at which that aircraft came down,” Duffy said.
The aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder, recovered about 8 feet (2.4 meters) beneath the ground’s surface, was on its way to be examined in Washington, D.C., Duffy said. He said the plane did not have a data recorder, but investigators are hoping to retrieve flight data from the jet’s ground proximity warning system.
“Information can come off that device, whether it’s the speed or location of the aircraft. We will be able to get some data, hopefully, off that device,” he said.
The Philadelphia crash occurred two days after the deadliest U.S. air disaster in a generation, when an American Airlines jet with 60 passengers and four crew members collided in midair in Washington, D.C., with an Army helicopter carrying three soldiers.
The girl who died in the Philadelphia crash had recently completed treatment for a condition not easily treated in Mexico, hospital officials have said. Others killed in the plane were neonatologist Dr. Raúl Meza of the State of Mexico near Mexico City and copilot Josué Juárez of Veracruz.
Audio recorded by LiveATC captured an air traffic controller at Northeast Philadelphia Airport telling “Medevac Medservice 056” to turn right when departing. About 30 seconds later, the controller repeats the request before asking, “You on frequency?” Minutes later the controller says, “We have a lost aircraft. We’re not exactly sure what happened, so we’re trying to figure it out. For now the field is going to be closed.”
