It was a beautiful day for skydiving. The skies were clear on Sunday after a night of thunderstorms, and so there was no shortage of eager members of the tight-knit community of thrill chasers ready to go up at Butler Memorial Airport, a small airfield about an hour south of Kansas City, Mo.
Many of the 11 people who took the third flight of the day on the single-engine turboprop plane run by the operator, Skydive Kansas City, were regulars. They were the ones who were hooked on the adrenaline rush of jumping out of a plane with parachutes strapped to their backs.
By the afternoon, the larger skydiving community, local officials and aviation experts were left with only questions and a grim scene: the plane’s wreckage in a field, the pilot and 11 passengers dead.
Federal investigators arrived Monday looking for answers, hoping to learn what caused the plane, barely 100 feet off the ground, to crash shortly after takeoff.
The crash was the deadliest involving a skydiving plane in 31 years, according to the United States Parachute Association. In 1995, a skydiving plane crashed in West Point, Va., also killing 12 people.
Here’s what we know about Sunday’s crash:
The crash occurred on a day with clear weather.
The skies were sunny after thunderstorms, heavy wind and rain had passed through the night before. Dennis Jacobs, the emergency management director in Butler, said the pilot had been trying to gain altitude in the Pacific Aerospace P750 plane, a model that was designed largely for skydiving.
When that was unsuccessful, the plane veered left, most likely in an attempt to land on a flat roadway, Mr. Jacobs said. Instead, the plane stalled and crashed in a field inside the perimeter of Butler Memorial Airport.
Michael Graham, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a video call with reporters on Monday that a preliminary report, which he expects to be made public within a month, will focus on three areas: human role in the accident, the plane and the weather. He added that he would not rule out anything in terms of the cause — even though witnesses have described the weather as beautiful for flying. He also would not speculate on whether the plane’s passengers were properly balanced inside the aircraft.
There may not be a black box.
Mr. Graham also said that planes as small as the one that crashed on Sunday are not required to have a flight data or voice recorder, also known as a black box, which records data and cockpit voices and can be instrumental in helping investigators determine the cause of a crash.
But Mr. Graham said investigators would be looking for other electronic devices to help reconstruct what happened — including passengers’ cellphones that may be intact.
The skydiving company has a lengthy history in Missouri.
Skydive Kansas City, which operated the flight, was founded in 1998 and is a fixture in the area’s skydiving community. It was the only skydiving business that used that airport, Mr. Jacobs said.
In January 2024, a private investment firm, Little Engine Ventures, announced that it was acquiring the company. The parent company also owns skydiving businesses in Indianapolis and Beloit, Wis.
On its website, Skydive Kansas City noted its “impeccable safety record.” But two years ago, an incident left at least one skydiver hurt and the plane destroyed.
The company lost a plane in May 2024 when the emergency parachute handle of a skydiver was “scraped” as he moved toward the door. According to a National Transportation Safety Board report, the parachute opened outside the airplane and then dragged the skydiver into the plane’s horizontal stabilizer, which is part of the tail of the aircraft. He was left with serious injuries, while the other five passengers and the pilot were able to jump out of the plane.
The crash recalled another in the Kansas City area.
Sunday’s crash rekindled memories of another deadly skydiving accident in the area — a 1998 crash of a plane that killed the pilot and five skydivers. An N.T.S.B. investigation blamed preflight inspection failures by the pilot for the accident, according to the report.
The engine manufacturer, Teledyne Continental Motors, agreed to pay $27.5 million to settle claims by the victims’ families.
How dangerous is skydiving?
Despite the inherent dangers of jumping out of an airplane thousands of feet above ground, skydiving has become safer in recent decades.
Fatal crashes have declined significantly over the years, according to data from the U.S. Parachute Association. The annual average number of fatalities dropped to 12.7 in the 2020s from 42.5 in the 1970s. Last year, there were about 3.5 million jumps from airplanes in the United States.
Crashes have also become less frequent. Since a skydiving flight crashed in Hawaii in 2019, killing 11 people, there had been nine fatalities in six crashes over a nearly seven-year span — until Sunday’s crash.
Reporting was contributed by Christina Morales, Danny Hakim, Maia Spoto, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Julie Bosman, Bernard Mokam and Ali Watkins.
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