PHILADELPHIA \u2014 A person in a car was the seventh fatal victim of the fiery crash of an air ambulance onto a busy Philadelphia street, authorities said Saturday, as investigators sifted through burned cars, damaged homes and charred debris for clues to determine why the aircraft plummeted shortly after takeoff.<\/p>\n
Carrying six people from Mexico, including a child who spent months in treatment at a hospital, the Learjet 55 went down just after departing from the Northeast Philadelphia Airport, creating what witnesses described as a massive fireball, shaking houses and leaving a chaotic street scene.<\/p>\n
Authorities couldn\u2019t yet say why the jet crashed, and Adam Thiel, the city\u2019s managing director, said it could be days \u2014 or longer \u2014 until officials are able to fully count the number of dead and injured across a sprawling impact area in a densely populated residential area.<\/p>\n
The plane took off, reached about 1,500 feet of altitude and then plummeted in a steep descent, crashing less than a minute after takeoff in what National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy called a \u201chigh-impact crash\u201d that left the plane \u201chighly fragmented.\u201d<\/p>\n
AP correspondent Julie Walker reports on another deadly plane crash, this one a small medical transport that crashed Friday night in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
As of Saturday morning, officials said, there were seven dead \u2014 six on the jet and the person in the car \u2014 and 19 injured. Most of the injured had been treated and released, hospitals said.<\/p>\n
There are \u201ca lot of unknowns about who was where on the streets\u201d when the plane crashed, and it is possible that the casualty figures will grow, Thiel said.<\/p>\n
The crash scene was at least four to six blocks, and authorities were working to assess the damage, including going house to house to inspect the dwellings, Thiel said.<\/p>\n
Homendy said her agency\u2019s staff was working to collect debris from the plane, which could take days or weeks, and haul it away to a secure location to begin evaluating it.<\/p>\n
Air traffic controllers didn\u2019t hear anything concerning before the crash, and her agency was still looking for the\u00a0cockpit voice recorder<\/span>, a helpful piece of evidence in the investigation, Homendy said.<\/p>\n Source: AP<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PHILADELPHIA \u2014 A person in a car was the seventh fatal victim of the fiery crash of an air ambulance onto a busy Philadelphia street, authorities said Saturday, as investigators sifted through burned cars, damaged homes and charred debris for clues to determine why the aircraft plummeted shortly after takeoff. Carrying six people from Mexico, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":435381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-435380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435382,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435380\/revisions\/435382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}