The pilot of a private plane that slammed into rugged Virginia terrain, killing all four on board, was spotted slumped over in the craft by fighter pilots scrambled to intercept the plane as it flew over Washington, D.C., an official said.
The Cessna, chased by military jets before it went down Sunday, took off from Elizabethton, Tennessee, at 1:13 p.m. ET before air traffic controllers radioed at 1:28 p.m. asking it to stop its climb at 33,000 feet, a senior government official told NBC News.
The plane, headed northeast toward Long Island, turned around near New York City and was headed back south when fighter jets from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland were sent to investigate, spotting the pilot slumped over, the official said.
The plane ran out of fuel and crashed near Montebello, Virginia, at 3:32 p.m. with the pilot in silence and out of communication with air traffic controllers in those final two hours, the official said.
The crash scene is in a “densely wooded, remote, mountainous area of Augusta County, near the Nelson County line,” more than a mile away from the Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller said.
First responders could only reach the scene by foot at about 8 p.m. Sunday, Geller added.
It could be days before NTSB investigators corral the highly fragmented debris field, the agency said.
“Everything is on the table until we slowly and methodically remove different components and elements that will be relevant for this safety investigation,” NTSB investigator Adam Gerhardt said.
The NTSB is leading the investigation into the incident, with officials arriving at the crash site near Montebello on Monday to “begin the process of documenting the scene and examining the aircraft,” the agency said in a statement.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, said F-16 fighter aircraft intercepted the plane after it was seen flying off course over the U.S. capital area. They tried to make contact with the pilot repeatedly using flares until just before the plane crashed near George Washington and Jefferson National Forest.
NORAD said a sonic boom “may have been heard by residents of the region,” with the sound reported around 3 p.m. to local law enforcement and on social media throughout the District of Columbia-Northern Virginia-Maryland area, known as the DMV.
Pilots from the Capital Guardians, a unit of the 113th Wing of the D.C. National Guard, found that the pilot was incapacitated, a senior government official said. They said the plane may have run out of fuel.
It is still not clear what might have caused the pilot to be incapacitated.
“The whole 180-degree turn around New York and then tracking directly over Washington, D.C. That sounds very odd to me,” NBC News aviation analyst Jeff Guzzetti said.
Sunday’s tragedy immediately led Guzzetti to think of the 1999 Learjet crash that killed professional golfer Payne Stewart. All on board that craft were incapacitated by lack of oxygen.
“It’s reminiscent of some sort of mechanical malfunction with the pressurization of the aircraft which would lead the occupants to become incapacitated because of a lack of oxygen,” Guzzetti said.
The plane was registered to a corporation based in Melbourne, Florida, owned by John Rumpel, who said Sunday that his daughter and granddaughter, along with their nanny and the plane’s pilot, had been on board.
David K. Li
Tom Costello and The Associated Press contributed.