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The Washington, D.C., region was rattled Sunday afternoon by a blast that officials said was a sonic boom from fighter jets scrambling to investigate a private plane’s unexpected flight path.
Pilots from the Capital Guardians, a unit of the 113th Wing of the D.C. National Guard, determined that the pilot was incapacitated, a senior government official said. The fighters shadowed the Cessna until it crashed, the official said.
In a statement, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, said F-16 fighter aircraft intercepted the plane and used flares in an unsuccessful attempt to contact a pilot. The spent flares were gathered by personnel on the ground and pose no danger to the public, NORAD said.
“The NORAD aircraft were authorized to travel at supersonic speeds and a sonic boom may have been heard by residents of the region,” it said.
NORAD said pilots tried to contact a pilot repeatedly until the moments before the jet crashed near George Washington National Forest.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the Cessna Citation went down in a sparsely populated area of southwest Virginia about 3 p.m.
President Joe Biden has been briefed about the incident, a White House official said. Asked whether it changed the security posture for those guarding the president, a White House official referred reporters to the Secret Service.
Biden was playing golf with his brother Jimmy at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Sunday afternoon before he returned the White House by motorcade. At one point reporters spotted him driving a golf cart.
Rattled residents in the Washington region took to Twitter to report hearing some sort of explosion in the area around 3 p.m. Sunday.
The Annapolis, Maryland, Office of Emergency Management tweeted that the boom “was caused by an authorized DOD flight.”
DC Homeland Security & Emergency Management tweeted, “There is no threat at this time.”
The aircraft took off from Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tennessee, bound for New York’s Long Island MacArthur Airport.
The fate of anyone onboard was unknown. The plane was registered to a corporation based in Melbourne, Florida.
The National Transportation Safety Board was investigating.
The senior government official said the plane may have run out of fuel.
The aircraft may have overflown its destination at an altitude of 34,000 feet, then turned southwest, the official said. At 2 p.m. it ceased radio contact, and the FAA alerted an ongoing security conference call that includes the military and the Department of Homeland Security, the official said. Then the fighters were scrambled.
Washington police, Bowie, Maryland, police and other police departments said they sent units to neighborhoods around the area in an unsuccessful search for the source of the sound.
Dennis Romero, Gemma DiCasimirro, Molly Roecker and Elizabeth Maline contributed.
