The National Transportation Safety Board has begun investigating the June 4 crash of Cessna 560 Citation V that had drawn the attention of national security agencies when it flew through secured airspace with a nonresponsive pilot. All four aboard the aircraft, N611VG, were killed when it spiraled to the ground at 3:25 p.m. local time near Staunton, Virginia, in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge mountains and the Alleghenies.
A 1990 model, the aircraft had been registered to Encore Motors of Melbourne, Florida, and the owner, John Rumpel, had told The New York Times and Washington Post that his daughter, two-year-old granddaughter, her nanny, and a pilot were aboard. Rumpel had added that his family was returning home to East Hampton after a visit with him.
The aircraft had departed Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Tennessee at 1:13 p.m. EDT on a flight to Islip-Long Island MacArthur Airport in New York. Flight trackers show the aircraft flying just past the destination but then making a 180-degree turn over Long Island and heading south at about 1 hour 15 minutes into the flight.
From there, the aircraft remained on a straight path for about 50 minutes, crossing over restricted airspace in Washington, D.C., and prompting security agencies to scramble an F-16 fighter. The Continental U.S. NORAD Region issued a statement that the F-16, in coordination with the FAA, had been authorized to travel at supersonic speeds, which caused a sonic boom that was reportedly heard throughout the region.
The F-16 pilot attempted to establish communications and used flares to draw attention from the pilot. But these attempts were unsuccessful. Instead, the aircraft entered a rapid descending right spiral from 34,000 feet—the cruise altitude that had prevailed through most of the flight—at an increasing rate of descent followed by another spiral at 20,000 feet, Air Safety Network (ASN) reported, citing ADS-B data. ASN added that the last ADS-B return showed an average rate of descent of 28,864 fpm.
AIN was unable to find any previous depressurization accidents in the NTSB database involving Cessna Citation 560/V/Ultra/Encore twinjets.