Oxygen tanks may have exploded aboard the plane that crashed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia radio host Rich Zeoli reported on Fox News.
“My sources at the Philadelphia Police Department say that because it was a medical plane, the oxygen may have mixed with the fuel. That may have caused the big fireball that we saw,” he said.
The Learjet 55 crashed at 6:30 p.m. local time on January 31 after taking off from an airport in northeast Philadelphia, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
According to local Fox television, there could have been at least six people on board: two pilots, two doctors, a patient and a relative. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will investigate the incident.
The plane was headed to Missouri. This was reported on Friday by the local division of ABC television.
Fox News, in turn, reports that the plane disappeared from radar 30 seconds after takeoff.
Meanwhile, the US Army today, at the request of his family, made the highly unusual decision not to release the name of one of the three soldiers who died in the collision on Wednesday evening near the capital Washington of the military helicopter "Black Hawk" with a passenger plane, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA
The Army identified two of the dead soldiers as Sergeant Ryan Austin O'Hara and Petty Officer 2nd Class Andrew Lloyd Ives, but did not provide details about the third.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that the helicopter crew involved in the fatal crash of an "American Airlines" regional passenger plane included two men and one woman.
"At the request of the family, the name of the third soldier is not being released at this time," the US Army said in a statement.
President Donald Trump suggested, but without providing evidence, that the deadly mid-air collision was the result of the Federal Aviation Administration's efforts to hire a more diverse workforce.
Yesterday, the Secretary US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while commenting on the crash, also criticized the policies of diversity, equality, and inclusion in the armed forces and government.