The jet was carrying Adina Azarian, her two-year-old daughter Aria, their nanny and the pilot, who has not yet been named. It took off at 1.13pm from Elizabethton Airport in Tennessee.
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The jet was carrying Adina Azarian, her two-year-old daughter Aria, their nanny and the pilot, who has not yet been named. It took off at 1.13pm from Elizabethton Airport in
Tennessee and was scheduled to land at MacArthur Airport in Islip, on Long Island.
Instead, at 2.45pm, the plane approached MacArthur but then turned around and flew south again, alerting DC officials.
No one on board answered calls from the ground, prompting the need for two F-16 fighter jets from Joint Base Andrews to rush to its side to investigate. They flew with such velocity that a sonic boom was heard over parts of DC and Virginia.
Once in the air, the F-16 pilots reported seeing the Cessna pilot slumped over in the cockpit. Within moments, the Cessna crashed, tumbling a terrifying 2,800ft-a-minute into St Mary's Wilderness, around 175 miles southwest of Washington DC.
While the tragedy remains under investigation, aviation experts tell DailyMail.com it was likely down to cabin pressure failure which will have caused the pilot - and everyone else - to pass out from a lack of oxygen.
When the plane approached Long Island, rather than landing it diverted back to the south.
Kyle Bailey, a former FAA Safety Team Representative, told DailyMail.com it was likely the result of the pilot programming his route.
'What appears to have happened as the plane was flying to Islip, it’ was very high.
'They very well might have been incapacitated [by then]. The pilot has waypoints in the program, it's similar to a GPS system. So the autopilot might have been flying him to Islip, then the next point could have very well have been the airport they departed from.
'It could have been towards DC or somewhere down south. It looks like it was affixed in that direction.
'In that scenario, it's likely the plane was flying itself.'
'It's most likely a loss of cabin pressure or the pilot became incapacitated. He could have had a heart attack or something like that but judging by the fact there weren't any emergency calls made from the passengers that we know of, I’m leaning more towards loss of cabin pressure.
'It typically happens in older planes,' Kyle Bailey, a former FAA Safety Team Representative, told DailyMail.com.
The Cessna involved was a Cessna Citation V 560 manufactured in 1990. It belonged to the company run by John and Barbara Rumpel, Adina adoptive parents, who confirmed her death and that of her daughter.
A plane manufactured that long ago would be considered old in aviation terms, Bailey said.
'It wouldn’t have the latest and greatest technology, the planes really evolved around the year 2000 that’s when the technology really went crazy,' Bailey said.
Such planes have a 'complicated' network of pressure relief valves which could have failed. It could have been sudden or gradual.
'When you’re up there it could be seconds, but if it’s very slow, it could manifest as slowly like making you tired then eventually you just pass out.
'It’s interesting, it probably happened fairly quickly because the pilot, if he was feeling ill or even slightly ill, he'd likely want to land at a closer airport.'
By the time the F-16s were scrambled, the plane was likely running out of fuel, he said.
'The timing actually works out perfectly. The crash was about an hour after it flew over Islip and there's around a 45 minute fuel reserve, so that works perfectly with the theory that it ran out of fuel.
'It just by chance it ran out of fuel just as it penetrated [the DC] zone.'
At 3.20pm, the F-16 jets were in the air.
At 3.22pm, the Cessna crashed into St Mary's Wilderness in the Shenandoah Valley.
The impact was so violent that it left a 'crater' in the ground.
'That rate of descent, 2800ft-a-minute, that is everyone’s worst nightmare.
'But they likely wouldn't have been conscious so it wouldn't have been painful for anyone,' Bailey said.