All five people aboard a single-engine airplane died after it crashed on Sunday in a field beside a runway during an attempt to land at a northern Colorado airport, authorities said, according to The Associated Press.
Peter Knudson, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the Piper PA-46 aircraft went down shortly before noon near the Erie Municipal Airport, about 25 miles northwest of Denver, the AP reported.
Knudson said the plane took off from Centennial Airport, south of Denver, with five people aboard, and was landing in clear weather at the Erie airport when it crashed, according to the AP. Three people were declared dead at the scene and two were taken to hospitals.
Emergency crews found three people dead inside the wreckage of the six-seat airplane when they arrived at the scene, said Roger Rademacher, assistant fire chief with Mountain View Fire Rescue, the AP reported.
Two crash survivors were taken to hospital but died later, Rademacher said, according to the AP. One had been moved by ground ambulance to a nearby hospital and the other airlifted to a Denver hospital.
The names of the dead have not been released and Knudson said investigators with the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration were at the site of the crash to try to determine its cause, the AP reported.
Erie Police Cmdr. Lee Mathis said the six-passenger plane crashed a few hundred yards northwest of the runway, but he did not know if it was landing or taking off, according to the AP.
A photo of the crash site posted on the Boulder Daily Camera's website showed the mangled wreckage of the plane, which crashed into a grassy field, the AP reported.
Jan Culver told the newspaper she was with a friend in a pasture near the airport when she heard the plane and saw it flying "really, really low," according to the AP.
"We heard it sputtering," she said, the AP reported. "Then there was no sound. We knew it was a crash."
She saw a small cloud of dust as the plane crashed and, because she has some medical knowledge, went to the scene to help, Culver said, according to the AP.
"It was a plane upside down with some folks already out of the plane," Culver said, the AP reported. "I could tell there were some bad injuries."
The Denver Post reported that NTSB records show the airport was the scene of three crashes in 2013 and two in 2012, but none of those incidents had a fatality, according to the AP.