On Sunday, people in the Washington, D.C., area heard a sonic boom as fighter jets flew at “supersonic speeds” to try to catch a pilot who wasn’t responding.
Sunday, a small plane crashed in Virginia, killing four people. Two F-16 fighter jets flew at “supersonic speeds” to try to catch up with an unconscious pilot.
According to The New York Times, the crash killed a two-year-old girl, her mother, the girl’s nanny, and the plane’s pilot. The Daily Mail said that the mother was an upscale real estate agent in the Hamptons named Adina Azarian. She was 49 years old.
NORAD said in a statement that two F-16 fighter jets were sent after the small Cessna 560 plane flew into restricted area. The jets were “allowed to go faster than the speed of sound,” and people in the area may have heard a “sonic boom” as a result.
Once the jets got to the Cessna that wasn’t moving, flares were used “to try to get the pilot’s attention” and “may have been seen by the public.”
NORAD said that the plane was “intercepted at about 3:20 p.m. local time” and that the pilot “was not responding.” The statement said that after many efforts to “establish contact with the pilot,” the civilian plane crashed near the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. “NORAD tried to get in touch with the pilot until the plane went down.”
The Times said that the plane was a private business jet owned by Encore Motors of Melbourne. John Rumpel, who runs the company, told the news outlet that the group was heading to New York after visiting him in North Carolina.
He said he didn’t know much about the crash, but he thought that if the plane had lost pressure, the four people on board “would have gone to sleep and never woke up.”
Rumpel’s wife, Barbara Rumpel, posted pictures of her daughter and granddaughter on Facebook on Sunday and wrote, “My family is gone, my daughter and granddaughter.”
First responders who went to the crash site said the plane left a “crater” and it looked like it hit the ground “at a very steep angle,” CNN said.
The NTSB is looking into the reason of the crash, which is still unknown at this time.
DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management noticed the boom right away. “We know that people all over the National Capital Region heard a loud “boom” this afternoon,” the agency wrote on Twitter. “There is no danger right now.”
When the F-16s went faster than the speed of sound, they made the sonic boom. The Air Force says that a sonic boom happens when something moves faster than sound (about 750 miles per hour at sea level).
Karen Hatchl, a teacher in Arlington, was playing frisbee with her students when they heard a loud noise that “sounded like thunder” even though “there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.” She says to PEOPLE that they “wondered if something had blown up.”
“It shook me up,” she says. “So much that I looked for an emergency message and radar to find out what it could be.”
Maddie Caywood, who works as a public relations manager, said, “I was with friends at a party outside in Capitol Hill. We heard a loud, booming sound that made the porch shake and everyone stop talking. It sounded like someone fired a gun nearby.”
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