Twelve people were killed when a skydiving plane crashed moments after takeoff from Butler Memorial Airport in Missouri on Sunday, turning a planned jump flight into a fatal disaster. The victims were identified Tuesday by the Bates County Coroner's Office, and the crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Among the dead was Kurt John Roy of Windber, Pennsylvania, who was 69 years old. He was one of 12 victims whose ages ranged from 23 to 69, a group that also included people from Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and India. The aircraft was a Pacific Aerospace P750 operated by Skydive Kansas City, and it went down in Butler, about 60 miles south of Kansas City.
What makes the crash especially hard to reconcile is how quickly it happened. The plane was being used for a skydiving flight, yet it went down almost immediately after takeoff, before it could reach any normal point in the climb. One witness told CBS Mornings that the plane appeared to come apart on impact. Another witness, Reed, said on Monday that it was “completely perpendicular with the wings to the sky, to the ground, going fast,” and that the ground and trees around it “exploded” before it “just lit up in flames.”
The names were held back until Tuesday, and Jerret Reno said in a Facebook post that the office waited to give friends and families time to reach out to their extended families. That delay also underscored how wide the loss already was: five victims were from Missouri, four were from Kansas, one was from Colorado and one was from India, with Roy the lone victim identified from Pennsylvania. The mix of home states and the single overseas victim makes this a local crash with a reach far beyond Butler.
The unanswered question is still the one that matters most: why a plane built for a skydiving run came down moments after takeoff. Reno said the investigation will take months to complete, and that is the most honest timetable available now. Until the National Transportation Safety Board finishes its work, the crash stands as a sudden, lethal failure with no public explanation for how a routine departure became a mass-casualty scene in seconds.
