The last moments of the crew manning the medical transport plane that crashed in Philadelphia, killing seven people, will remain a mystery because the cockpit voice recorder was not working at the time, federal investigators said Thursday.
In fact, the so-called “black box” voice recorder had “likely not been recording audio for several years,” the National Transportation Safety Board wrote in a preliminary report.
A second device, a ground warning system that recorded flight data, may contain additional information about the deadly Jan. 31 crash, according to the NTSB. That was sent to its manufacturer for further evaluation.
The Learjet 55, operated by Jet Rescue Air Ambulance, took off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport just after 6 p.m. on Jan. 31. The plane reached about 1,650 feet into the air before plummeting into the ground in a residential and commercial area of the city just one minute after takeoff.
All six people onboard the plane were killed in the wreck, along with one person who had been in his car on the ground. An additional 24 people on the ground were injured in the disaster.
The non-functional voice recorder was found 8 feet deep in a crater of soil and debris, federal investigators said. The pilots had been in contact with local air traffic controllers but never made a distress call before the crash. The cause of the wreck remains under investigation.
From Philadelphia, the flight was destined for Springfield, Mo., and eventually Tijuana, Mexico. An 11-year-old girl, Valentina Guzman Murillo, had been receiving treatment at a Philadelphia children’s hospital for an illness that was difficult to treat in Mexico. She’d just been released to go home. Valentina’s mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, was also killed in the crash.
