Damaged Wing May Have Caused Crash; 6 Killed

A sheared wing may have caused a single-engine plane to crash into a pine forest on New Year’s Eve, killing all six people aboard, a member of the search crew said Friday.

The plane, a Cessna 210 Centurion, went down during a rainstorm just before 8 p.m. PST Wednesday in a heavily wooded area of Hamilton County, five miles south of the Florida-Georgia border.

Poor weather hampered search efforts, and the wreckage was not found until Thursday morning, officials said.

The names of the plane’s occupants--three men and three women--still had not been released Friday, pending notification of relatives. Investigators did, however, confirm that the pilot was from Peoria, Ill.

The plane had filed a flight plan from Huntsville, Ala., to Orlando, and was about 20 miles southeast of Valdosta, Ga., when it lost radio and radar contact with the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center.

No Cause Announced

Deputies speculated that the group may have been flying to Orlando for the Citrus Bowl college football game between Auburn and USC.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the scene late Thursday and said it was too early to determine what caused the crash. But a search crew member who found part of the wreckage said it looked as though one of the wings had been sheared off before the crash.

“I can tell from looking at it that whatever happened, happened in the air,” Tommy Hart said. “You could tell by the wing that there was no explosion or burn marks or anything like that. It looks to me like wind shear, or something like that.”

FAA officials said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the crash, but they confirmed that the plane began flying erratically just before it disappeared from radar.