A Private Airplane Crashed Into Maryland Woods Overnight And Killed All Three On Board

A single-engine Piper Cherokee that took off from Ocean City, New Jersey just before midnight Saturday crashed into a wooded area near a residential neighborhood in Bowie, Maryland, killing all three people aboard.

The pilot and two passengers, all adult men, were pronounced dead after rescuers located the wreckage early Sunday morning.

Their identities are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

The plane departed Ocean City Municipal Airport at approximately 11:30 PM Saturday and was en route to Montgomery County Air Park in Maryland, a flight that covers roughly 130 miles and would normally take under an hour in a small aircraft.

About 15 minutes after takeoff, Prince George's County Public Safety Communications received an iPhone crash alert indicating a crash had occurred near the intersection of routes 50 and 301 in the Bowie area.

A ground and aerial search involving multiple agencies was immediately launched.

The wreckage was found in the early hours of Sunday morning in woods close to a residential neighborhood. No injuries were reported on the ground.

Maryland State Police said investigators believe the aircraft belongs to a local flight school in Montgomery County and that the flight may have been a training flight.

The cause of the crash is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.

The iPhone crash alert that triggered the search, a feature introduced in recent iPhone models that detects sudden stops consistent with vehicle crashes and automatically alerts emergency services with a location, is credited with directing responders to the correct area quickly in conditions where the wreckage might otherwise have been difficult to locate in dense woods at night.

Three men flew out of Ocean City late on a Saturday night. None of them came home.