It was a sad day for volunteers of Angel Flight Northeast after a Piper Seneca on a mission for the group crashed in Upstate New York on Friday, killing a cancer patient, his wife and the pilot.
The airplane had taken off from Hanscom Field near Bedford, Massachusetts, with the brain cancer patient — whose body has not been recovered — and his spouse on board. A Connecticut man piloted the volunteer medical flight, which crashed in a wooded area at about 5 p.m. in Garoga, midway between Albany and Syracuse.
The main wreckage was pulled from the New York pond Tuesday, which will be drained in their search for the cancer patient according to Fulton County Sheriff Thomas Lorey.
“Angel Flight NE staff and volunteers are tremendously saddened by this tragedy and we all offer our thoughts and prayers to the families of those affected,” said Larry Camerlin, the group’s founder and president, in a statement.
Angel Flight is a nonprofit group that arranges free air transportation for the sick. Angel Flight Northeast has set up free air transportation for more than 65,000 patients on about 60,000 flights covering more than 12 million miles. The group was founded in 1996.
Witnesses at a nearby campground said they saw the twin falling from the sky while missing a wing. National Transportation Safety Board investigators scoured the crash site over the weekend looking for smartphones, GPS receivers, iPads or other items that could give the investigators electronic clues of what happened in the final minutes of flight.
