A small airplane en route to a college football playoff game on Saturday crashed into a post office parking lot in Louisiana shortly after takeoff, killing five people, including a well-known sports reporter who was the daughter-in-law of one of the team’s coaches.
The two-engine Piper Cheyenne crashed in the city of Lafayette about 1.6km from the regional airport where the flight began, US Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Tony Molinaro said.
Investigators from the agency and the US National Transportation Safety Board were investigating, according to Molinaro and a board statement on Twitter.
Photo: AP
It was an eight-passenger aircraft, Lafayette Fire Chief Robert Benoit said.
Six people were on board the plane, five of whom were killed, he said.
The sixth, a 37-year-old man, was being treated at an area hospital along with two people who were in the post office.
A person who was either in or near a car on the ground was also “impacted” by the crash and was being treated for injuries, Benoit said.
He did not elaborate.
A blackened car sat in the post office parking lot, which was carpeted with scattered tree limbs.
Kevin Jackson and other eyewitnesses told KLFY-TV that the airplane hit a car as it fell, and that someone could be heard screaming inside the vehicle.
Steven Ensminger Jr, son of the offensive coordinator for the Louisiana State University football team, said his wife, Carley McCord, was on board the flight and died when it crashed.
He said the airplane was en route to the Peach Bowl playoff game in Atlanta, Georgia, between LSU and Oklahoma.
“I just don’t feel like this is real,” Ensminger Jr told reporters in an Instagram message.
He said he was unable to go to the game and was at work when the crash happened.
He said that his father, Steven Ensminger, called him just before the elder Ensminger got to the stadium.
The coach had tears in his eyes when he appeared on the field at the start of the game on Saturday afternoon, and LSU players embraced him with hugs.
“He’s the MVP right now,” LSU head coach Ed Orgeron said in a half-time interview.
The Lafayette Fire Department identified the other people who were killed as Ian Biggs, 51, the pilot; Robert Vaughn Crisp II, 59; Gretchen Vincent, 51; and Michael Walker Vincent, 15.
The injured passenger, Stephen Wade Berzas, was in critical condition, department spokesman Alton Trahan said.
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS