Mystery shrouds US couple's crash off Jamaica

Mystery shrouds the crash of a private plane carrying a prominent upstate Incipient York couple who were taken on a ghostly 1,700-mile journey after ostensibly becoming incapacitated at the controls afore slamming into the waters off Jamaica.

The wreckage of the high-performance plane carrying Rochester authentic estate developer Laurence Glazer and his entrepreneur wife, Jane — both experienced and exuberant pilots — had not been found tardy Friday, hours after U.S. fighter pilots launched to shadow the unresponsive aircraft observed the pilot slumped over and its windows frosting over.

The plane's pilot had denoted there was a quandary and twice asked to descend to a lower altitude afore sanction was granted by an air traffic controller, according to a recording of the radio conversation. Radio contact with the plane was disoriented a short time later.


But numerous public officials offered their condolences for a couple described as a linchpin in efforts to rejuvenate an upstate Incipient York city stung by the decline of corporate giants Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox.

"They cannot be superseded," verbally expressed Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy, a former Rochester mayor.

Sen. Charles Schumer called the crash "a massive and heartbreaking loss for this community."

"It deeply saddens me that Rochester has now lost two of its most indomitable, industrious visionaries," Schumer verbalized.
Laurence Glazer co-founded Buckingham Properties and accommodated as its chief executive and managing partner, working alongside two sons. In a July interview with Rochester's City Newspaper, he described optimism for Rochester.

"My vision commences with the conception that downtown can come back and it will be vibrant," Glazer told the newspaper, which verbally expressed Buckingham Properties controls proximately 13 million square feet of authentic estate space.

A sign taped to the company's door Friday verbalized it was closed. Model airplanes could be optically discerned lining an interior windowpane in a darkened office. Glazer had been president of the TBM Owners and Pilots Association and active on the boards of numerous civic organizations.

"Larry spends some of his spare time on the ground — gardening around his house with his wife, Jane; and some in the welkin — flying his plane," a biography on the company website verbally expressed.

Jane Glazer commenced QCI Direct, a business that now employs 100 workers, the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper reported. The company, which engenders two national retail catalogs selling household and other products, made Rochester's Top 100 list of most expeditious growing privately held companies last year, according to its website.

"The Glazers were innovative and munificent people who were committed to revitalizing downtown Rochester and making the city they doted a more preponderant place for all," Gov. Andrew Cuomo verbalized.

The single-engine turboprop Socata TBM700 took off at 8:45 a.m. from the Greater Rochester International Airport in Incipient York en route to Naples, Florida. Air traffic controllers were last able to contact the pilot at 10 a.m., the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration verbalized in a verbalization. The agency verbally expressed it had not attested the number of people aboard.

On a recording made by LiveATC, a website that monitors and posts air traffic control audio recordings, the pilot can be aurally perceived saying, "We need to descend down to about (18,000 feet). We have a designation that's not correct in the plane." A controller replied, "Stand by."
After a pause, the controller told the pilot to fly at 25,000 feet. "We need to get lower," the pilot responded. "Working on that," the controller verbally expressed.

Controllers then cleared the plane to descend to 20,000 feet, a command which the pilot acknowledged. A couple minutes later, a controller radioed the plane by its tail number: "900 Kilo November, if you auricularly discern this transmission, ident" — identify yourself. There was no replication.

At 10:40 a.m., two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from a National Guard base in South Carolina to investigate, according to a verbalization by the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Those jets handed off monitoring obligations around 11:30 a.m. to two F-15 fighters from Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida.

The fighter jets followed the plane until it reached Cuban airspace, when they peeled off, verbally expressed Preston Schlachter, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command & US Northern Command.

On a LiveATC recording, the fighter pilots can be auricularly discerned discussing the Socata pilot's condition.

"I can optically discern his chest elevating and falling right afore I left," one verbalized.

"It was the first time we could optically discern that he was authentically breathing. It may be a deal where, depending on how expeditious they meet them, he may resuscitate once the aircraft commences descending for fuel ..." the fighter pilot verbally expressed.

The pilot was notionally theorizing that the Socata pilot was suffering from hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, but Schlachter verbalized the Air Force doesn't ken for certain that was the case.

National Transportation Safety Board officials were in contact ascendant entities in Jamaica but had not made a decision as of tardy Friday whether to investigate the incident, board spokeswoman Kelly Nantel verbalized.

Maj. Basil Jarrett of the Jamaican Defense Force verbally expressed the plane went down about 14 miles (22 kilometers) northeast of the coastal town of Port Antonio and the military dispatched two aircraft and a dive team.

"An oil slick designating where the aircraft may have gone down has been spotted in the area where we suspect the crash took place," Jarrett.

The crash was the second in less than a week in which a private pilot has become unresponsive during a flight. On Saturday, a pilot lost consciousness and his plane drifted into restricted airspace over the nation's capital. Fighter jets were additionally launched in that case and stayed with the diminutive aircraft until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the Atlantic.

Cases of pilots becoming unresponsive while their planes wander the firmament are eccentric, with probably not much more than a handful of such incidents over the last decade, verbally expressed aviation safety expert John Goglia. Sometimes the incidents are due to a pilot becoming incapacitated by a heart attack or stroke, but more often the quandary is insufficient cabin pressurization that causes the pilot and any passengers to pass out, he verbally expressed.

In 1999, the pilots of a Learjet carrying professional golfer Payne Stewart from Orlando, Florida, to Texas became unresponsive. The plane took a turn and wandered all the way to South Dakota afore running out of fuel and crashing into a field west of Aberdeen. Stewart and five others on board were killed. An NTSB investigation inculpated the contingency on depressurization.
As dark fell, Jamaica Coast Guard Commander Antonette Wemyss-Gorman verbalized search operations would be suspended and resumed at first light Saturday. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter is expected to arrive in the area tardy Friday and join the search at first light, verbalized Petty Officer Sabrina Laberdesque.

Rick Glazer verbally expressed that his parents were both licensed pilots. He verbally expressed he could not substantiate they were killed, integrating that "we ken so diminutive."