A small plane crash just south of the Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport kills both occupants of the aircraft.
Rock County Sheriff Troy Knudsen called it an “experimental” type of aircraft that crashed near Happy Hallow Park just after 9:00 Tuesday morning.
Investigators believe the plane came down within minutes after taking off from the Janesville airport, suffering an unidentified problem after leaving the runway.
The online flight tracking website Flight Aware shows a plane number N13VT took off from the airport at 9:13 a.m. and crashed at 9:17 a.m. The same plane had flown into Janesville from Appleton earlier that morning.
The sheriff’s department was not able to confirm the tail number of the downed plane due to the damage it sustained.
Janesville Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes said the plane crashed into a wooded area, which broke the wings off of the fuselage and caused the plane to land upside down along a creek extending from the Rock River.
Emergency responders set up multiple extraction teams, one by land and one by water using the sheriff’s department’s airboat.
“We did utilize some local knowledge of the landscape and the lay of the land to access a trail, but the snow was too deep for our ATVs,” Rhodes said. “There were trees down, so we started to saw-cut the trees to get them out of the way and open it up, but we determined it was way too deep.”
The two victims were deceased when the first emergency crews reached them through the water.
Police have not identified the victims, and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash site.
A plane with the matching tail number N13VT appears in earlier videos posted by Florida-based Velocity Aircraft Incorporated, which could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
