http://www.wmtw.com/news/15200728/detail.html
The first news paper article:
Saturday 02FEB08
WEST GARDINER -- Two people apparently died when a plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of West Gardiner minutes after taking off Friday night from Augusta State Airport.
Emergency responders searched near Melissa Drive for any survivors of the six-seat Cessna Citation jet that went down in a sleet storm.
Two people -- a woman who was piloting the plane and a passenger, reported to be a young boy age 6 or 8 -- were seen boarding the jet before it took off at 5:45 p.m. from Augusta, heading for Lincoln, Neb., airport officials said.
"We found a 200-by 300-yard debris field," Gardiner Fire Chief Mark Kimball said from the scene. "We are aggressively searching for victims."
Inside the fire station, neighbors said chaos and uncertainty reigned as officials began coordinating rescue efforts with limited information available. Officials prohibited a reporter from entering the fire station.
Residents who were outdoors at the time of the crash said the plane caught fire on impact and ignited vegetation surrounding the crash site.
"I saw an orange glow in the sky," Melissa Drive resident Eric Lisch said. "I wasn't sure what it was. That would be the last I thing I would have thought -- a plane crash."
Melissa Drive resident Karl Swenson said he and his wife heard the plane crash from inside their house.
"We didn't think much of it until everyone showed up," Swenson said.
Rescue workers located the wreckage before 6:30 p.m. and were determining how to reach the heavily wooded crash site about a mile off the road while, nearby, residents lined Melissa Drive with snowmobiles and cars. Some offered to lend their snowmobiles and ATVs to firefighters. Firefighters, sheriff's deputies and Maine State Police officers set up a command center at the West Gardiner Fire Station to coordinate the rescue effort.
Radio traffic indicated the pilot reported having problems shortly before contact was broken. Maine State Police were alerted by a call from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to Steve McCausland, state police spokesman.
"We initially got the word from the FAA, presumably because it disappeared from radar," McCausland said.
At 7 p.m. Friday, the FAA flight tracker showed progress of the twin-jet aircraft frozen at 58 minutes into flight.
The jet had been parked at the airport for several days, according to David Smith, chief pilot for Maine Instrument Flight. He said he did not know the names of the people aboard.
The Cessna Citation CJ1 aircraft is registered to the Jeanette Symons Trust of San Francisco and arrived Saturday in Augusta from Quad City International Airport in Moline, Ill.
At the Maine Instrument Flight office at the Augusta airport, Smith and two others fielded phone calls from the press and others.
Most of the lights were off inside the nearby commercial terminal at the time the crash was reported.
"Colgan's done for the night," Smith said. "They quit early because of the weather."
John Guimond, manager of the Augusta State Airport, said runways were not plowed Friday evening during the storm.
"You let the rain hit the snow and scrape it off when it stops raining," Guimond said.
He said he expected to see FAA investigators at the airport today since Augusta was the point of departure.
Guimond said he had little information about the airplane or who may have been aboard.
"Because it's general aviation, Maine Instrument Flight handles all the private planes," Guimond said.
The second newspaper article:
Sunday 03FEB08
A prominent technology-industry executive and her 10-year-old son have been identified as the victims of a Friday night plane crash in West Gardiner.
Jeanette Symons, 46, and her son Balan, both of Steamboat Springs, Colo., died Friday after their plane went down in the woods near Melissa Drive. Alison Rhodes, a spokeswoman for Symons's company, Industrious Kid, confirmed their deaths Saturday afternoon to the Kennebec Journal.
"Yes, I'm afraid it was her and her son," Rhodes said.
Symons and her son had been at a weeklong ski camp in Sugarloaf. Symons, a licensed pilot, flew her own plane, a Cessna Citation C-525, to Augusta State Airport last week.
The plane took off in an icy rain Friday at about 5:45 p.m. It reached 3,000 feet before Symons reported to air-traffic controllers in Portland that there was a problem with the attitude indicator, said spokesman Jim Peters of the Federal Aviation Administration. An attitude indicator is an instrument used in an aircraft to inform the pilot of the orientation of the airplane relative to earth.
Dan Smith, chief pilot for Maine Instrument Flight, across from the airport, said he saw Symons and her son Friday evening before they were to head home.
"Some customers are real chatty and friendly but she looked like she wanted to get out here," he said. "She was in a hurry."
Smith said the pair arrived in Augusta on Jan. 26, then rented a car for the week. He had never seen Symons or her plane before, adding the airport has "a lot of regulars that we see."
Symons and her son returned to Augusta on Friday as the rain drizzled and the temperatures dropped, resulting in slush and ice accumulating on city streets -- and on the airport runway.
John Guimond, manager of the Augusta State Airport, said the runways were not plowed Friday night.
Despite the poor weather, Smith said no one would have the authority to tell Symons to not take off.
"We don't make those calls," Smith said. "This is a very hard thing to deal with. We're not happy it happened."
Symons' Cessna disappeared off the radar not long after takeoff, Peters has said. When rescue workers arrived near Melissa Drive in West Gardiner, much of the wreckage was burned or on fire, leaving a crater-like impression in the ground, McCausland said Friday.
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board declined to confirm the victims' names Saturday afternoon. Investigator Jose Obregon said he did not have enough information to even speculate what may have caused the crash.
Rhodes, who does marketing work for Symons, said she did not know the technology mogul very well, only meeting her for the first time a few weeks prior to the crash.
"She was a brilliant and vivacious woman," Rhodes said.
Symons was a well-known businesswoman in the San Francisco Bay-area before relocating last year to Colorado with her son and 7-year-old daughter.
Tim Donovan, a co-founder and vice president of marketing for Industrious Kid, said he has known Symons for more than a decade.
"Jeanette was fearless in her pursuits, both professional and personal," Donovan said, in a telephone interview Saturday afternoon. "She is someone I considered a dear friend."
Symons, who Donovan described "very much a self-made woman," rose to fame in the late 1980s when she helped launch Ascend Communications Inc., which started with a handful of workers and grew to over 5,000 employees. The company was sold to Lucent Technologies for $24 billion in 1999, according to a biography of Symons on her Web site.
Symons was named the wealthiest woman in the country under the age of 40 by Fortune magazine in 2001, and was reported having a net worth of $374 million that year -- ahead of Tom Cruise and Tiger Woods.
Donovan said Ascend was only one of Symons' many professional endeavors. None were as important to her as Industrious Kid, which Donovan said Symons established after being inspired by her children.
Imbee.com, one of Industrious Kid's more recent technologies, has gained fame as a version of MySpace for young children, or a "Facebook with training wheels," Donovan said.
"Jeanette was passionate about developing technologies for children where they could be safe at the same time," Donovan said, adding that parental involvement and control was what set imbee.com apart from other social network sites.
"She wanted to bring people together and make good things happen," he said.
Donovan said he and Symons's other colleagues are struggling to understand why the Steamboat Springs woman took off in inclement weather.
"She was very seasoned," Donovan said Saturday afternoon when asked about Symons's flying experience, which he gauged at between 15 and 20 years. "The plane was one of her primary means of transportation."
After taking a deep breath, Donovan continued, "To hear of this accident is just devastating. She wouldn't have left if she didn't think she could take off safely."
Symons and her son are survived by Symons' mother and young daughter, Donovan said.
"She was an awesome person, a fabulous, hands-on mother and a great friend," Donovan said. "She will be missed by all of us."
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We were getting a nasty wintery mix when this took place. i work at an airport only 20 mins from where the plane departed. i just cant believe that some one would have taken off in such nasty weather!!
EDIT: The tail number was N102PT
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