Medical Transport Plane Crashes in Philadelphia
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Medical Transport Plane Crashes in Philadelphia

Medical Transport Plane Crashes in Philadelphia

Posted by Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 06:00pm
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A devastating plane crash rocked Northeast Philadelphia last night when a medical transport jet went down in a fiery explosion, killing all six people on board. The jet had just taken off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport around 6 p.m., only to plummet into a crowded area near Roosevelt Mall moments later. The crash lit up the night sky, leaving behind a catastrophic scene as first responders rushed in and investigators worked to determine what went wrong.

Fox News’s Bret Baier was one of the first to break into regular programming with the shocking news:

For the next few hours, Philadelphia witnessed scenes straight out of an apocalypse as residents and officials scrambled to make sense of what had happened.

Eyewitness footage quickly flooded social media. The first few videos showed the jet barreling out of the sky, heading straight for the ground. Several Ring cameras captured the horrifying moment from different parts of the city as homeowners ran for cover.

As the news spread, more footage emerged—showing the wreckage near Roosevelt Mall, as onlookers rushed to document the devastation and assist where they could. (Warning: Some videos contain strong language and graphic scenes.)

As the night went on, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade took over coverage:

Then came the most haunting footage: the moment of impact, captured from multiple angles:

Some were dangerously close to the disaster. One man captured the moments right after impact while sitting in a drive-through:

Another horrifying video surfaced—showing a victim engulfed in flames, emerging from the crash site. Out of respect, that footage is not included here.

What We Know So Far

Authorities identified the plane as Learjet 55 flight XABMC, a medical transport flight carrying a pediatric patient and her mother, along with medical staff and the flight crew. The plane was en route to Tijuana, Mexico, with a planned stop in Missouri. Tragically, there were no survivors. The death toll sits at 7 with 19 injured, but that is expected to rise according to local sources.

3 out of the 6 people on board the flight have been identified. The first two were flying the plane: Alan Montoya and co-pilot Jesús Juárez. The third person identified was the doctor onboard: Doctor Raúl Meza. The mother and child’s names have not been released.

In the aftermath, X users posted footage of the plane’s remnants scattered across the crash site:

As the coverage went into the night drone footage captured the fires still burning from above:

And as the sun rose, daylight revealed the full scale of the devastation:

As someone who lives near Reagan National Airport outside of DC, my heart goes out to the entire Philadelphia community in this tragic moment.

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Comments

rduke007 | February 1, 2025 at 6:07 pm

Bill Waldock of ERAU and sometimes Air Disasters said “Medivac Lear 55 crash 40 seconds after takeoff from Philly.”

I saw doorbell video in which it appeared to be in a spin

Ice and or aft CG /weight – loading conditions could be involved

Petrushka | February 1, 2025 at 6:20 pm

My pilot contact says there are frequent small aircraft crashes, and most get no publicity.

“ In 2019, small planes were involved in 1,220 accidents, with 233 of those crashes leading to fatalities. The number of accidents involving small planes increased slightly from 1,220 in 2021 to 1,277 in 2022.

Aviation attorney Jim Brauchle from Motley Rice stated that there is probably a plane crash somewhere in the United States almost every other day, and almost 99 percent of the time, those crashes involve noncommercial planes. This indicates that small plane crashes are more common than commercial plane crashes.”

rhhardin | February 1, 2025 at 6:34 pm

No spin, no stall, most probably a flight control problem. Too fast and too straight to be a spatial disorientation problem.

    alaskabob in reply to rhhardin. | February 1, 2025 at 7:14 pm

    Straight down with final rate of descent of 11000 fpm. Looks like on fire. Horizontal stabilizer loss would result in that type of sudden departure. If catastrophic loss of engine and damage to tail could happen. I am reminded of the Aero Mexico jet that lost its elevator to midair collision over SoCal.. Key is to see if parts of plane away from crash site.

      alaskabob in reply to alaskabob. | February 1, 2025 at 8:38 pm

      Update from Juan Brown on YouTube showing flight path, altitude, airspeed superimposed in Google Earth. The plane was supposed to turn right after takeoff but only starts the turn before a smooth and increasing turn to the left and accelerated loss of altitude. Note…. smooth…. Early thoughts….. spatial disorientation as plane enters soup at 400 feet while needing pilots to turn, change frequencies, and…. the big one…. required turning on of yaw dampener. The plane’s lights in the clouds looked like fire. They lost control of the airplane and no time to correct when coming out of clouds at about 400 feet at a rate of descent of 11000 feet per minute.

        rbeypw in reply to alaskabob. | February 1, 2025 at 10:24 pm

        I live in the area, and from the daylight drone footage and the flight path data the plane was turning hard to the left and down as it crashed. If you look the map Juan Brown is showing at 6:55 on the video linked below the crater is in the sidewalk on the north side of Cottman (opposite the row houses) where the gray drive in the parking lot is, short of the building at the bottom of the screen (A Dunkin Donuts shop). From the burning debris field and the shape of the crater the plane was just short of reaching parallel with the street, maybe 15 deg or so, and the burnt cars in the street are between this impact point and in front of the Dunkin.

        This is a busy street, a main east/west artery in this part of the city, I used to commute on it in the evenings back in the 90s. Fortunately the plane struck between the traffic lights and traffic was not backed up to that point from either light. I’m actually amazed there are so few burnt out cars. That particular exit from the parking lot isn’t used as much as others and there isn’t much pedestrian traffic (the bus stops are closer to the Boulevard), particularly given the weather. A couple of hundred yards further up or down that flight path and the casualties on the ground would have been much worse.

    rduke007 in reply to rhhardin. | February 1, 2025 at 8:04 pm

    It appeared spun from the doorbell cam

JohnSmith100 | February 1, 2025 at 7:13 pm

Well, i bet that there are Affirmative and DEI incompetents somewhere in the mix. Our culture is so infested, so many potential points of failure along supply lines, services. And they can multiply. Maybe bad fuel? Power loss on takeoff, deadly.

MajorWood | February 1, 2025 at 8:01 pm

My SWAG would be ice debris off wing into engine. Definitely burning before impact and reported right-left sudden jags at full takeoff power suggests a power imbalance with then induced spin. As it come straight down it will be much harder to discern which parts left the airframe prior to the crash. Was likely still at full flaps which makes plane harder to maneuver and/or correct.

This was the flight into Philly that day.

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/MTS56/history/20250131/1730Z/KOPF/KPNE

    rbeypw in reply to MajorWood. | February 1, 2025 at 9:46 pm

    I live about 4 miles from the crash site. The weather was well over 40F, light rain, and had been all afternoon. The plane had flown up from Florida earlier in the day and had been on the runway for about 4 hours. I don’t see how ice could have played a role, even if the plane had picked up some on the flight in.

MajorWood | February 1, 2025 at 8:02 pm

Juan Brown is the go to for anything aviation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6_bLhBMngY

mailman | February 2, 2025 at 3:12 am

Back in the day I was working my way towards my CPL and one of the things that changed for the good (a rarity let me tell you that!) was the change in reporting from attributing EVERYTHING to pilot error to the actual cause of a crash.

Problem with attributing everything to pilot error is that you never got to the root cause of a crash:

Now with DEI in the mix my fear is that “experts” still infected with DEI disease will once again use the pilot error excuse to hide any involvement that can be attributed to DEI and the lower safety standards that are inherent to that disease thus making it harder to cut that cancer out of the system.

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