A small aircraft with four people on board crashed Saturday morning in a field near Trilla, a rural part of Illinois, around 65 miles south of Champaign, New York Times reported. The crash occurred at approximately 10:15 a.m. and prompted an immediate response from emergency crews and state police.
Illinois state police described the incident as “an active and ongoing fatal aircraft investigation” but did not specify how many of the four individuals died. Debris from the single-engine Cessna 180 was found scattered across a nearby roadway, which remained closed for several hours.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that the aircraft went down about 12 miles from Coles County Memorial Airport in Mattoon. Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have launched investigations to determine the cause of the crash. Officials have not confirmed if anyone on the ground was hurt.
Governor JB Pritzker acknowledged the tragedy on social media, saying, “We keep those impacted by the plane crash in our thoughts today. Thank you to the first responders who rushed to the scene.”
This crash adds to a recent string of small aircraft incidents in the United States. Just one day earlier, three people died in a plane crash in eastern Nebraska. And on April 12, six lives were lost when a twin-engine plane went down in New York.
