Weather was “deteriorating” when a small plane carrying MIT soccer star Karenna Groff and several family members crashed in upstate New York, the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday amid its ongoing investigation.
A mere four minutes before the accident that killed six people outside the town of Copake around 12:15 p.m. Saturday, the minimum ceiling for visibility was just 400 feet, NTSB official Todd Iman said in a news briefing, citing automated data from the Columbia County Airport, about 10 miles from where the twin-engine Mitsubishi MU-2B went down in a muddy field.
Shutterstock
Stock image of a Mitsubishi MU-2B plane photographed in 2020. (Shutterstock)
He stopped short of saying that weather caused the crash; the investigation is in its early stages.
“What we can say is weather was at the time what we consider to be deteriorating,” Inman told reporters.
The 400 feet would have been the absolute minimum for approaching a runway under instrument flight rules “for that type of landing on that approach at that time,” he said.
Officials from several agencies were being brought in to help with the investigation, and several data cards, hundreds of images and a slew of other materials would provide key information, he said.
Video of the flight’s final seconds “appears to show that the aircraft was intact and crashed at a high rate of descent into the ground,” Inman said.
Among the victims was Groff, the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year who had played soccer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She had been traveling with her father, neuroscientist Dr. Michael Groff; her mother, Dr. Joy Saini, a urogynecologist, and Karenna Groff’s boyfriend, James Santoro, a fellow MIT graduate. Groff’s brother, paralegal Jared Groff, was also aboard, as was his partner, Alexia Couyutas Duarte, who was set to enter Harvard Law School this fall. The group had been en route to celebrate Groff’s 25th birthday, People reported.
With News Wire Services
