What happened? Flight tracker details doomed jet that took off in Ohio, crashed in Florida
More details of a doomed flight from Columbus that crashed in southern Florida on Friday are available through an online flight-tracking service.
FlightAware shows the entire path of the chartered Bombardier Challenger 600 jet that crashed near Naples on Friday afternoon after taking off from Ohio State University's airport with five people aboard.
Read More: How often do jets like one that took off from Ohio State and crashed in Florida go down?
At least two people died in the plane crash and three survived. The plane collided with two cars on the ground and all of those in the ground vehicles survived, according to authorities.
Here's what the flight tracker shows us about how the ill-fated flight unfolded.
How did the flight start off?
The FlightAware plane-tracking service shows that the aircraft had not begun its trip in Ohio, but had flown over 1,000 miles to Columbus that morning from Florida.
Just days earlier, the same jet had made a round-trip flight from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico, a resort island near Cancun. That trip, on Wednesday, took about 80 minutes each way, according to FlightAware.
By Friday, the jet was back in Florida before it took off from Fort Lauderdale at 9:35 a.m. and arrived at the Ohio State airport in just under two and a half hours, at 11:57 a.m.
The plane then took off again on a return flight to Florida, with a stop in Naples, which is home to one of the wealthiest zip codes in America, reports the Naples Daily News.
Read More: Bombardier Challenger 600 series aircraft has history of fatal crashes, records show
The flight-track data shows that the jet climbed to 40,000 feet over West Virginia within about half an hour after departing Columbus, and continued due south while cruising at just under 540 mph.
What happened when the plane reached Florida?
Around 90 minutes into the flight, the plane crossed the Florida panhandle and headed out over the Gulf of Mexico, about 50 miles west of the Florida peninsula. Shortly afterward, the plane started a steady descent from 37,000 feet and when it reached an altitude of about 4,800 feet, it turned east just past Sanibel Island and headed inland toward Naples.
Naples was just minutes away, but the plane would never make it to the airport.
The flight tracker shows the jet made a final hard right turn over Interstate 75 —the highway it crashed onto— about 5 miles north of the Naples Municipal Airport. The National Business Aviation Association described the airport as a "little" airport that since the mid-1990s has served only "general aviation," or non-commercial flights, and "today has almost no airline service."
Within a span of roughly two minutes, the plane dropped from 1,800 feet at a speed of 188 mph to 500 feet and 130 mph, before suddenly recording zero feet, according to FlightAware. A recording shows that the pilot had reported to air-traffic controllers having lost both engines moments before crashing.
wbush@gannett.com
@ReporterBush
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: FlightAware offers clues to how chartered Ohio jet crashed in Florida
