Three small airplanes crashed this long Labor Day weekend from
North Carolina to Oregon, leaving 10 people dead and pressing questions about
what happened in each case, a government official said Monday.
The deadliest
crash occurred late Sunday afternoon, when a Cessna 310 went down in a remote
part of Colorado near Telluride, the National Transportation Safety Board
tweeted.
All five people
aboard that aircraft died, according to NTSB spokesman Peter Knudsen.
How and why they died remained mysteries a day later, as
Colorado National Guard and a search and rescue team converged on the site.
Three people
were killed around noon Monday when a Beechcraft A36 crashed near a rock quarry
about 6 miles from its intended destination in Greensboro, North Carolina, Knudsen
said.
That plane's
pilot, who had taken off earlier from Sarasota, Florida, told air traffic
controllers he was disoriented and trying to find his way to Greensboro's
airport. The NTSB spokesman said that controllers tried to steer the pilot to
the airport, without success.
More than 2,000
miles away in Oregon, a small plane crashed near an airport in Creswell, Lake
County Sheriff's Office Lt. Chris Doyle said.
The two-seater
crashed around 10 a.m. (1 p.m. ET) in a field near the airport in Creswell,
which is about 12 miles south of Eugene. Authorities arrived to find the plane
on fire and, eventually, that the two people inside -- the 35-year-old pilot
and his 83-year-old passenger -- had died, according to Doyle.
Such fatal
crashes are not rare.
For example, NTSB data indicates 115 people died in U.S. plane crashes between January
1 and May 31 of this year, including 29 in May alone. The vast majority of
those deaths were on personal-use aircraft.
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