Burlington - Ten men and one woman died when two small twin-engine aircraft collided in mid-air over a New Jersey suburb yesterday, sending flaming wreckage crashing into a two-storey home, authorities said.
The collision between two Piper aircraft occurred at 7.54 a.m. (12.54 a.m. Irish time) scattering wings, engine parts and other debris across a mile-wide radius in Burlington Township, between Trenton and Philadelphia along the Delaware River.
All 11 people killed were aboard the two aicraft. Police identified nine of the dead as civilian employees of the US Navy, who had taken off from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey aboard a Piper Navajo PA-31. The two people who died in the second plane, a Piper Seminole PA-44 from Northeast Philadelphia Airport, were a flight instructor and a student.