An A36 Beechcraft Bonanza light aircraft took off last Thursday from New York's John F. Kennedy airport in the direction of Richmond Heights (Ohio) with two people on board: the pilot, Boruch Taub;
and a passenger, Binyamin Chafetz.
Taub had flown his friend to New York City for a funeral and were returning to Ohio together that afternoon when the plane he was flying apparently suffered a technical failure.
“We are losing oil pressure, this is an emergency,” Taub warned over the radio, according to recordings published by NBC News in New York.
It was 5:25 pm (Eastern Time) and I was flying over an area one mile from the Westchester County Airport (New York) just half an hour after takeoff.
“Do you have power in the engines right now?
Can you maintain altitude?” an air traffic controller asked Taub.
"No, the engine is failing...
Mayday, mayday, mayday
" was the answer, using the international slogan for help.
Boruch Taub (left) and Ben Chafetz.Affiliate NBC New York
“As the plane moved forward, it was losing altitude due to the failure, or whatever was eventually decided to be the reason, and the pilot knew he had only a handful of minutes to land;
he was incapable," a Westchester County official explained at a news conference.
The White Plains airport lost contact with the plane shortly after: the plane went down at 5:28 p.m. in a wooded area two miles from the runway where the pilot had planned to make an emergency landing.
Rescue teams took hours to locate the wreckage;
They did it thanks to the cell phones of its occupants.
In one of them, the passenger's, they found the messages he sent to his wife just a minute before crashing.
“I love you and the children.
I'm sorry for everything I did.
We lost our engines," Chafetz's messages read.
[The Latina woman who died in the accident in Nepal is identified]
Image of the text that Ben Chaifetz sent a minute before crashing.
NBC affiliate in New York
Rabbi Ely Skorski, a friend of Chafetz's, told NBC News the message arrived "by mistake" in a community group chat room but said the man's intention was to send it to his wife.
"Where exactly did it end up, I don't think it ended up where it was destined," the rabbi said.
Taub and Chafetz were members of an Orthodox Jewish community in Ohio.
The bodies were airlifted to Cleveland.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are now in charge of the investigation.