December 9, 2014
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
A corporate jet crashed into a Gaithersburg, Md. subdivision yesterday, striking three houses and killing six. The plane was owned by Health Decisions Inc. CEO Michael Rosenberg, who was one of the victims.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating. The names of the dead on the plane have not been released. Three people, including Rosenberg, were onboard the plane. Rosenberg was piloting the plane. On the ground, Marie Gemmell, 36, and her sons, Devon (1 month old) and Cole (3 years old) died when the plane struck their house.
Health Decisions Inc., located in Durham, N.C., is a contract research organization (CRO), utilizing its Agile Clinical Development methodology to optimize all components of clinical studies. Health Decisions won the Association of Clinical Research Professionals’ 2014 Award for Innovation in Clinical Research, and Rosenberg won the Triangle Business Journal 2014 Life Sciences CEO of the Year Award.
The plane, a twin-engine Embraer SA Phenom 100, was attempting to land just before 11 a.m. yesterday at the airport in Gaithersburg. Some pilots yesterday warned of sightings of large numbers of birds near the Montgomery County Airpark’s runway just moments before the crash. The NTSB is investigating. No conclusion about the crash has been determined.
The plane’s data and cockpit voice recorders have been recovered and sent to the NTSB’s laboratory in Washington. A NTSB spokesman, Robert Sumwalt, indicated that the plane tore a gash in the roof of one house, broke up, with the fuselage hitting another house. One of the wings ripped off and struck a third house, which exploded and caught fire. He indicated no conclusions had been made.
“Nothing is off the table,” Sumwalt said to the Winston-Salem Journal. “Everything is on the table at this point.”
Rosenberg’s party left the Chapel Hill Horace Williams Airport at about 9:30 a.m. Monday, which traveling to Washington, D.C. According to flight plans, they expected to return Monday night or Tuesday morning.
Rosenberg was an experienced pilot, flying a variety of planes since 1975. In March 2010 he had a crash at the Montgomery County Airpark, when he ran a turbo prop plane off the runway and into the trees. No one was seriously hurt in that incident.
The Gaithersburg airport does not have a control tower. It utilizes what pilots call “common radio frequency” to communicate with other planes. According to records, at least one other plane was attempting to land ahead of the Rosenberg’s plane.
