Montana Plane Crash Kills 17

A plane believed to be carrying a party of children from California on a school skiing holiday crashed on its approach to an airfield in Montana last night, nose-diving into a field next to a cemetery and killing 17 people on board.

A US federal aviation administration spokesman, Mike Fergus, said the plane had crashed about 500ft away from the airport in Butte. "We think that it was probably a ski trip for the kids," he said. The crash is the third major plane incident in the US since the beginning of the year.

One witness, Kenny Gulick, aged 14, who lives near the airport, told the ­Montana Standard that the plane had been making sharp turns. "All of a ­sudden the pilot lost control and went into a nose dive," said Gulick. "He couldn't pull out in time, and crashed into the trees of the cemetery."

The plane, a Pilatus PC-12 single engine turboprop built in 2001, had set off from Oroville in California, and the pilot had filed a flight plan showing its destination at Bozeman, Montana. But he canceled the flight plan and instead headed for Butte.

In California, Tom Hagler, owner of Table Mountain Aviation, told the San Francisco Chronicle he saw a group of about a dozen children and four adults yesterday morning at the Oroville Municipal Airport, about 70 miles north of Sacramento.

Hagler described the children as ranging from about six to 10 years old. He let the children into his building to use the restroom.

"There were a lot of kids in the group," he said. "A lot of really cute kids."

Hagler added he showed the pilot where he could fuel his plane, and the pilot said he expected his flight to take two and a half hours.

Martha Guidoni and her husband Steve saw the crash from a petrol station near the Holy Cross cemetery. "We had just came out of the gas station, across from the cemetery, and watched it crash. It just nose-dived into the ground," she said.

She told CNN: "We drove into the cemetery to see if there was any way my husband could help someone, and we were too late. There was nothing to help."

Her husband said the plane "went into the ground" and hit a tree, setting it alight. He said: "I looked to see if there was anybody I could pull out, but there wasn't anything there, I couldn't see anything. There was some luggage strewn around … there was some plane parts."

Aviation attorney Mary Schiavo, a former federal inspector, suggested the plane may not have been certified to carry such a large number of passengers.

"This aircraft is only certified for nine passengers," she told CNN. "Granted, they said that they were children, but unless people were holding them in their laps, which is not a safe way to fly, only nine passengers and two crew," Schiavo said.

"The maximum weight when you're landing this plane, you're only allowed to have 9,000lbs pounds (4,000kg) on it and the empty weight is almost 6,000lbs (2,700kg). So, that's not a lot of leeway."

A US national transportation safety board spokesman, Keith Holloway, said that its investigators were expected to arrive in Butte late last night or early this morning.

In February an aircraft hit a house at Buffalo in New York state, killing 50 people.ary, a passenger plane made a spectacular emergency landing on the Hudson river in New York after hitting a flock of geese. All 155 people aboard survived.