Tragic new details have emerged about the final moments of a family who were killed in a horror plane crash in upstate New York.
Federal investigators have put together a timeline of the events which led up to the deaths of the six victims on April 12.
Former MIT soccer player Karenna Goff, her physician parents, Dr. Michael Groff and Dr. Joy Saini, her brother, Jared Groff, and his partner, Alexia Couyutas Duarte and Karenna Groff´s boyfriend, James Santoro were aboard the aircraft when it went down.
The Massachusetts family was heading to the Catskills to celebrate Karenna’s 25th birthday and the Passover holiday.
Their private plane departed Westchester County Airport in White Plains, New York, at around 11:30am heading north to Columbia County Airport in Hudson, according to a National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report issued Friday.
The aircraft was piloted by Michael Groff, 55, who had left the Boston suburbs early Saturday morning, picking up Karenna Groff and Santoro in White Plains.
But at about 11:57am Michael Groff informed air traffic control that he had missed the initial approach to the runway at Columbia County Airport, according to the report.
The controller then gave him new instructions for the landing, which Groff acknowledged a little after 12pm.
But around a minute later the controller warned Groff the plane was flying at a low altitude, the report states.
The pilot never responded and despite multiple warnings, air traffic control received no further radio transmissions from the plane until radar contact was eventually lost.
The Mitsubishi MU-2B-40 crashed in snow covered terrain roughly 10 miles south of the airport.
Investigators didn’t provide an exact cause of the crash in the preliminary report.
But they noted that all major components of the aircraft found within a 150-foot debris field and that no significant weather advisories were in effect in the region at the time of the crash.
NTSB officials have previously said overcast conditions may have impacted the pilot’s visibility and that an initial investigation had not turned up any issues with the aircraft.
The crash orphaned the Groff’s youngest daughter Anika Groff, who had recently announced she would attend the University of North Carolina in the fall.
James’s father, John Santoro described the victims as, ‘a wonderful family’.
‘The world lost a lot of very good people who were going to do a lot of good for the world if they had the opportunity. We’re all personally devastated,’ he said.
Karenna was the NCAA’s 2022 woman of the year, her boyfriend was an MIT graduate.
Karenna’s father was a neuroscientist and her mother was a urogynecologist.
Duarte was due to attend Harvard Law School, while her boyfriend Jared Groff was a paralegal.
Michael Groff was certified and had also been flying for ‘a number of years’ and ‘from a very young age’, according to officials.