New York divers look for 3d person on plane

2 others die on Angel Flight that had left Mass.

Emergency vehicles parked along the road in Ephratah, N.Y., as the search for the pilot of a downed Angel Flight out of Massachusetts continues.Bethany Bump/The Daily Gazette/AP

State Police divers in New York are searching a reservoir for a third person who was aboard a small Angel Flight Northeast plane that took off in Bedford Friday and crashed near Garoga, N.Y., killing two others, a Fulton County Sheriff official said.

The National Transportation Safety Board sent two investigators to the reservoir to determine what caused the Piper PA 34 aircraft to crash.

Investigators who arrived Saturday afternoon determined the plane had begun to break apart before crashing, a spokesman said.

“The wreckage imprint indicated that the plane did not enter the pond intact and broke up midflight,” said Eric Weiss, an NTSB spokesman. “Small pieces of wreckage were found as far away as 5 miles from the main wreckage.”

Authorities declined to identify the people on board.

The flight was arranged by Angel Flight Northeast, a nonprofit that provides free air travel for medical patients. The plane took off from Hanscom Field in Bedford en route to Rome, N.Y.

On Friday, officials recovered the bodies of one male and one female, Fulton County Sheriff Thomas Lorey said.

The sheriff’s office and New York State Police waited until daylight Saturday to search the reservoir for the plane and third person, whom they believed was trapped inside.

The pilot had filed an instrument flight rules plan, a document that pilots flying in poor visibility routinely submit to the Federal Aviation Administration before takeoff, said Weiss.

Radio contact was lost with the plane around 5:10 p.m. Friday, said Weiss. There were no distress calls from the aircraft, he said.

Multiple witnesses said they heard a loud explosion and one witness reported seeing the main airplane wreckage floating in the pond shortly afterward, according to Weiss.

Weiss said no memory modules had been recovered from the plane as of Saturday night.

The reservoir that the divers are searching, about half a mile away from New York State Highway 29 outside Garoga, is not a particularly large body of water, said Sergeant Brian VanNostrand of the Fulton County sheriff’s office.