Global Courant
The Washington, D.C., region was rocked Sunday afternoon by a blast that officials said was a sonic boom from fighter jets scrambling to investigate the unexpected flight path of a private jet.
Pilots from the Capital Guardians, a unit of the DC National Guard’s 113th Wing, determined that the pilot was incapacitated, a senior government official said. The fighters followed the Cessna until it crashed, the official said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the Cessna Citation crashed at about 3 p.m. in a sparsely populated area of southwestern Virginia.
In the DC region hunted residents took to Twitter to report that an explosion of some kind was heard in the area around 3 p.m. Sunday.
The Office of Emergency Management in Annapolis, Maryland, tweeted that the boom was “triggered by an authorized DOD flight.” Military officials have not publicly linked the two events.
“There is no threat at this time,” the DC Homeland Security & Emergency Management said in a tweet.
The plane took off from Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tennessee, bound for Long Island MacArthur Airport in New York.
The fate of everyone on board was unknown. The aircraft was registered to a company based in Melbourne, Florida.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated.
The senior government official said the plane may have run out of fuel before impact, about 2 miles northeast of Montebello, Virginia.
The plane may have passed over its destination at an altitude of 34,000 and then turned southwest, the official said. At 2 p.m., radio contact ceased and the FAA alerted an ongoing security conference involving the military and the Department of Homeland Security, the official said. Then the fighters were scrambled.
Local police departments, including the Metropolitan Police Department and Maryland’s Bowie Police Department, said they sent units to neighborhoods in the area in an unsuccessful search for the source of the noise.
Dennis Romero contributed.
