SAVANNAH, Ga. — Five people aboard a single-engine plane died when the aircraft crashed in rural southeast Georgia, scattering debris across a wooded area a few miles from the local airport, authorities said Thursday.
“We don’t have an intact plane,” said Vic Peacock, the Bacon County coroner, who estimated pieces of the airplane were flung across an area of pine forest about 300 feet in diameter. “There’s wreckage everywhere in this small area. It just disintegrated, basically.”
Peacock said four men and a woman, most of them friends since high school, were killed in the crash a few miles outside Alma, a rural city about 100 miles southwest of Savannah.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane, a single-engine RV-10, crashed Wednesday about 4 miles east of the small Bacon County Airport. The National Transportation Safety Board was investigating the cause of the crash.
Authorities believe the plane went down shortly after taking off from the local airport Wednesday at about 2:30 a.m., said Bacon County Sheriff Richard Foskey.