11 months ago
OROVILLE, CA - Authorities believe no local passengers were aboard a small plane that lifted off from Oroville Municipal Airport and crashed in Montana Sunday.
At a press conference Sunday evening, Oroville police Chief Kirk Trostle said the plane and its passengers stopped briefly in Oroville Sunday morning before heading off to Bozeman, Montana.
The plane diverted to Butte where it crashed as it approached an airport, killing 17 people, including several children, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said.
FLIGHT PLAN: Follow the plane's flight path
VIDEO: No Oroville locals believed aboard downed flight
The single engine turboprop plane crashed about 500 feet from the airport in Butte while attempting to land, said spokesman Mike Fergus.
While there was no official word on who was aboard the doomed flight, Trostle said there was no indication anyone joined the trip during their Oroville stop.
"At this point, we're going on that assumption," Trostle said.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said witnesses on the scene reported seeing what appeared to be skis in the wreckage. Preliminary reports indicated an unknown number of children were killed, the FAA said.
"We think that it was probably a ski trip for the kids," Mike Fergus, an FAA spokesman for the Northwest region, told the Associated Press.
The plane had departed from Oroville late in the morning for a flight to Bozeman. But the pilot diverted the plane to Butte, about 80 miles northwest of Bozeman, Brown said. She said the pilot did not give a reason for changing his destination.
The Montana Standard reported on its website that the plane crashed into Holy Cross Cemetery. The cemetery is about 500 feet from the runway at Butte's Bert Mooney Airport, the FAA said. The pilot had reported having the runway in sight before going down, Brown said.
There were no known fatalities on the ground, Fergus said.
Martha Guidoni, who was at a nearby gas station, said the plane "just nose-dived into the ground."
"My husband went over there to see if he could do anything," she said.
The aircraft was a Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 single-engine turboprop plane registered to Eagle Cap Leasing in Enterprise, Ore., the FAA said. Brown said the aircraft was not certified by the FAA for charter use. She did not know who was operating the plane.
The plane left the city of Redlands just east of Los Angeles on Sunday morning and flew to Vacaville, according to records at FlightAware.com, an aviation tracking service. It stayed in Vacaville for 50 minutes before taking a short flight to Oroville, where it was on the ground for a half-hour before leaving for Montana.
FlightAware.com said the plane typically carries six to nine people and is certified to carry 12. There was no immediate explanation for the larger number of people reported killed.
Calls to Eagle Cap Leasing were answered by a telephone answering service. Calls to the service went unreturned.
The National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a crash investigation team from Washington, D.C., to the scene, Brown said.
News10/KXTV and The Associated Press
