PHILADELPHIA _ Federal investigators have returned to a suburban Montgomery County neighborhood in an effort determine the cause of a small plane crash that claimed the lives of two Philadelphia doctors and their 19-year-old daughter.
Jasvir Khurana, 60; his wife, Divya, 54; and their daughter, Kiran, had set out on a family trip in their single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza when the plane went down about 6:20 a.m. Thursday, according to investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the lead agency in the investigation.
Khurana, a licensed pilot, was at the controls of the aircraft, which was registered to him.
As part of the investigation, officials Friday morning began gathering pieces of wreckage from the aircraft for transport to a facility for further examination.
The 44-year-old plane took off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport and was in the air for three minutes before rapidly losing altitude and crashing into the rear yards of four homes on Minnie Lane in Upper Moreland Township, about 10 miles from the airport.
The flight manifest indicated the Khuranas, of Lower Merion Township, were headed to the airfield at Ohio State University and then on to St. Louis.
Adam Gerhardt, an air safety investigator for the NTSB, said the investigation would last several days. A preliminary report is expected in 10 to 15 days, and a final report within a year.
Investigators said the pilot did not make distress call before the crash.
As the plane fell from the sky, it narrowly missed homes in a verdant suburban development, but no one on the ground was harmed.
Records show that Jasvir Khurana got his private pilot's license in 2014, and the plane was registered with the FAA in 2016.
According to activity logs on FlightAware, the aircraft took off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport 10 times in the last three months, including Thursday morning.
An audio recording of Khurana's communication with an air-traffic controller around the time the plane took off shows that the controller slowly and clearly read out the route, the transponder code and the radio frequency so Khurana could get in touch with the next controller on his route.
Khurana repeated that information to the controller incorrectly, then appeared to mistakenly call her again instead of contacting the next one after being corrected on the information.
The Bonanza is among the most popular single-engine planes in the United States, according to Tom Turner, executive director of the air-safety arm of the American Bonanza Society, an organization for owners of the plane.
The aircraft model, F33A, has been involved in seven fatal accidents in the last 10 years in the United States, according to NTSB records.
A used plane, such as the one that crashed, sells today for between $80,000 and $300,000, he said. Its powerful engine permits it to take off from smaller airfields, climb rapidly, and cruise at 200 miles per hour.
In its early years, 75 years ago, the plane was nicknamed "the doctor killer." Turner said the nickname has long been shed, but reflected that some affluent initial buyers had trouble coping with its power, high for that time for a private plane.
Beechcraft has produced 17,000 of them since 1947, marking the plane as the longest-continually produced plane still being manufactured. Estimates are that 12,000 are still airborne.
Jasvir Khurana was a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Temple's Katz School of Medicine. His wife, Divya S. Khurana, was a pediatric neurologist at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children and a professor at Drexel University College of Medicine.
Kiran graduated last year from Harriton High School, where she was on a nationally ranked squash team. The couple's other daughter, who is in her 20s, was not aboard the plane, authorities said.
