The young patient who was on board the small medevac jet that crashed in a Philadelphia neighborhood Friday evening was heading home to Mexico after receiving “life-saving treatment” in the US, an official said.
The girl was one of six — four passengers and two crew members — onboard the Learjet 55 that plummeted out of the sky shortly after 6 p.m., less than a minute after taking off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport en route to Missouri’s Springfield-Branson National Airport.
The child was heading back to Tijuana with her mother, a doctor, paramedic, pilot and copilot, Shai Gold, spokesman for Jet Rescue Air Ambulance, told NBC 10 Philadelphia.
“All I can say is the patient was sponsored by a third-partner charity to undergo life-saving treatment in the US,” Gold said, adding, “She did her course of care. She was going home.
“She fought quite a lot to survive, and unfortunately this tragedy on the way home.”
No victims have been identified, and the cause of the crash is not yet known.
The Learjet 55 caused a massive blast when it went down, with one eyewitness describing it as “Earthquakish” to WPVI.
“The sky lit up, and I pulled over and basically it was just real bad around it,” they said.
“It lit up the whole sky.”
The aircraft crashed in a residential neighborhood around three miles from the airport, setting several homes and cars ablaze, Philly Mayor Cherelle Parker said.
Video footage showed heavy plumes of smoke billowing into the night sky as debris was scattered across the parking lot of the nearby Roosevelt Mall.
Mass casualties were reported, according to an X post from City Councilman Mike Driscoll.
A spokesperson from the Federal Aviation Administration told The Post that the agency will investigate the tragic crash with the National Transportation Safety Board.
The Learjet 55 crash comes just days after an Army Black Hawk helicopter’s midair collision with an American Airlines flight over Washington, DC, killing all 67 people on board both aircraft.
Wednesday was the deadliest aviation crash on US soil since Nov. 12, 2001, when 260 passengers died after an American Airlines jet plummeted into a New York City neighborhood just two months after the 9/11 terror attacks.
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