| David Jewel 2004-10-24, 7:12 pm |
| 5 Dead in San Diego Air Ambulance Crash
Sunday, October 24, 2004 4:30 PM EDT
The Associated Press
Rescuers hiked though rugged terrain near the Mexican border Sunday to reach
the remote site where a private jet went down after taking off from San
Diego, killing all five people aboard.
The Learjet was being used as an air ambulance when it crashed carrying two
pilots, two paramedics and a nurse on a flight bound for Albuquerque, N.M.
The plane went down around 12:30 a.m. Sunday in a mountainous region about
two miles east of a small San Diego airstrip, said Larry Levy, CEO and
medical director of Albuquerque-based Med Flight Air Ambulance, which owned
the aircraft.
It was the company's first crash since starting operations in 1979.
Emergency personnel had to hike to the crash site. They had located three
bodies by late morning, said Capt. Glenn Revell of the San Diego County
Sheriff's Department.
"It's the terrain that's hampering us," Revell said.
The cause of the crash had not been determined. The Federal Aviation
Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board were
investigating, Levy said.
The crew was returning to Albuquerque after carrying a patient from Mexico
to San Diego, Levy said. The airstrip at Brown Field, just north of the
border, is used as a port of entry for private aircraft arriving in
California from Mexico and by military and law enforcement aircraft.
Radio contact was lost just one minute after takeoff, Levy said.
Med Flight Air Ambulance suspended operations "to give the crews time to
debrief and cope with the circumstances," Levy said. The company has about
100 employees at bases in Albuquerque; El Paso, Texas, and Las Vegas, Nev.
The company withheld the names of the victims, but Levy said four were based
at Albuquerque and the fifth worked out of El Paso.
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Med Flight: www.medflightair.com/
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