WASHINGTON – The National Transportation Safety Board released their preliminary findings Thursday regarding the crash of a medevac plane in Philadelphia on January 31st. Just one minute after taking off from the Northeast Philadelphia Airport, Learjet 55 dove out of the air and into a sidewalk in a Philadelphia neighborhood. The crash and ensuing explosion killed all six people on board the plane as well as another outside the plane, injured several more, and left an eight-foot-deep crater in the sidewalk in addition to damaging several nearby buildings and cars. From the crash site, officials were able to recover the plane’s cockpit voice recorder as well as the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System computer. Upon reviewing the voice recorder, the NTSB concluded that it did not record any flight data during the accident, and it likely hadn’t recorded any flight audio for several years prior to the accident. The information on the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System computer is still being reviewed and investigated, and there’s hope that its contents may be able to help provide more answers as to how and why the accident occurred. All the information provided so far is only preliminary, and is therefore subject to change as the investigation work continues.
