A Pacific Aerospace 750XL turboprop plane carrying a pilot and 11 skydiving passengers crashed Sunday near Butler Memorial Airport in Missouri, killing everyone aboard.
Missouri Highway Patrol Sgt. Justin Ewing confirmed the plane was taking passengers up to skydive when emergency responders received a call around 11:30 a.m. that the aircraft was down and engulfed in flames.
The crash occurred in a field adjacent to Butler Memorial Airport, a small facility roughly 65 miles south of Kansas City serving around 30 privately owned aircraft.
The private plane was operated by Skydive Kansas City, according to Dennis Jacobs, the acting airport manager and Bates County Emergency Management Agency director.
“It had just taken off and made a left turn” before the crash, Jacobs said, adding, “In my opinion I think it was losing power, and he was trying to make it over to the highway and land, and he stalled and went down nose first and caught fire.”
Emergency responders managed to extinguish the blaze shortly after the crash, with Jacobs describing the scene as “brutal.”
Sgt. Ewing noted the roadway near the crash site was shut down as a precaution, saying, “It landed in a field adjacent to the airport, but I think they’re shutting down the roadway just as a precaution.”
First responders swept the area beneath the flight path and found no evidence that anyone had attempted to jump from the plane before it went down.
Teams from the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration were dispatched to the site Sunday afternoon to begin a formal investigation into the cause of the crash.
The Pacific Aerospace 750XL involved in the crash is a single-engine turboprop widely used in skydiving operations, capable of carrying up to 17 skydivers and operating from short runways, with the specific aircraft manufactured in 2010 according to FAA records.
Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti, a former crash investigator for both the NTSB and FAA, said poor maintenance has been a recurring factor in skydiving plane accidents due to comparatively lax regulatory oversight.
Guzzetti explained that skydiving companies are held to the same standards as private plane owners rather than the more stringent requirements applied to charter operators and commercial airlines.
“There’s been a whole history of skydiving accidents for inadequate maintenance and deficient safety culture,” Guzzetti said, pointing to a broader pattern of regulatory gaps in the sector.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol stated that troopers were on site assisting the Butler Police Department and Bates County Sheriff’s Office, with Butler itself a town of approximately 4,300 residents.
Skydiving companies in the region typically operate eight or nine months a year, running from late March or early April through October or November, and someone answering the phone at Skydive Kansas City declined to speak to a reporter.
