Two people were killed Tuesday afternoon when a small, twin-engine airplane crashed in a DuPage County horse pasture about a mile north of DuPage County Airport.
Wayne Police Chief Robert Heitzman said a preliminary investigation showed the craft might have been finishing a training flight when it dropped from the sky at 5:05 p.m. The plane, a Mitsubishi MU2 turboprop, was on approach to the airport and crashed about a quarter mile west of Powis Road and north of Smith Road.
The DuPage County coroner’s office was unable to identify the two victims, both men, as of Tuesday night. Heitzman could not say whether the plane was privately owned or on a commercial flight.
The plane narrowly missed a retention pond just east of a Union Pacific rail line. It crashed on the property of Joe Stanley, who was in his home when he heard the crash.
“I heard a plane coming in a lot lower than normal,” Stanley said. “Then all of a sudden, I heard a thud that lasted 3 to 4 seconds.”
Stanley said he looked out his back window, saw the wreckage and called 911. He said he and his brother, Charles, ran to the crash site to see if they could help, but they could find no survivors.
Preliminary evidence indicated the aircraft was heading toward the airport from the northeast when it went down, according to Heitzman. He said investigators searched about a quarter mile north of the crash site looking for more debris and tree damage, but they found none.
It appeared the plane came down on a steep trajectory, with wreckage confined to a small area, according to Heitzman.
That scenario would seem to back up the eyewitness accounts of two friends who were driving in the area to go snowmobiling when they saw the plane in trouble.
“It just looked like it was going really slow for some reason, and the next thing you know, it just started pointing nose down,” said Dave Dominguez, one of the snowmobilers. “It looked like it twisted a little bit and then just went straight down into the ground.”
Dominguez’s friend, Chris Meyers, lives near the crash site and also saw the plane go down.
“When I saw it, I thought it was a helicopter doing traffic or something, because it was just moving a little funny,” Meyers said. “It looked like it stalled and did a little half-twist. Then it went down very fast.”
Heitzman said the plane came very close to landing in the pond.
Snow and low temperatures made conditions less than ideal for investigators.
“We are very lucky, from a recovery standpoint in this weather, that it did not come down in the water,” Heitzman said.
A recorded message from Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Don Zochert said that the plane had been in contact with DuPage Airport before it crashed and that communication had been lost minutes after 5 p.m.
The Mitsubishi MU2 model has been involved in notable fatal crashes in the past. A 1986 crash of a MU2 in Aurora claimed four lives and a 1993 crash in Iowa killed South Dakota Gov. George Mickelson and nine others.
Peter Siekmann, chief deputy DuPage County coroner, said officials had hoped to use photo IDs for identification, but the injuries were “too massive.” Instead, he said they planned to use dental records or fingerprints to identify the bodies.
He said it was unlikely they would be identified until early Wednesday.
