(Newswire.net — September 6, 2014) — The plane strayed hundreds of miles from its filed flight plan, heading out over the Atlantic Ocean on a straight-line course that took it over the Bahamas before it entered Cuban airspace, where NORAD said the fighter jets broke off pursuit.
As they looked into the aircraft, fighter jets pilots saw the pilot and the passenger of the TBM-900 slumped over in and the windows frosted over which indicate cabin depressurization.
When that occurs, pilot are trained to instantly descend to safe altitude, which pilot of the single-engine TBM-900 requested, but not immediately allowed because there was traffic on lower altitude.
Before losing contact with the aircraft, ATC received a message: “We need to descend to around [18,000 feet], we have an indication that’s not correct in the plane.”
According to an air-traffic-control recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the aircraft was cleared to descend to 25,000 feet by ATC, but the aircraft responded, “We need to get lower.”
No emergency was declared to air-traffic control, which would speed up the process of guided descending.
The plane was later cleared down to 20,000 feet, but it remained at 25,000 feet, where the aircraft held before crashing.
The American fighter jets broke off their pursuit 12 miles off Cuba, at which point the TBM-900 plane was still cruising at about 25,000 feet.
A Cuban fighter jet took over trailing the aircraft as it flew near that Caribbean island, according to NORAD.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration. at around 2:15 pm EDT, the plane crashed into waters about 14 miles north of Port Antonio, Jamaica,
The US Coast Guard issued a statement indicating there were “three people reportedly aboard” the plane. Yet Scott Fybush, the family spokesman and also the Glazers’ nephew, said he believed the couple were the only people on the plane, with Larry Glazer flying the couple toward their vacation home in Florida.
Cuba was cooperating fully with the United States on the matter and did not consider the plane’s movement a violation of its airspace, according to a Cuban source involved in conversations between the two nations.
The Cuban government even let the US Coast Guard’s C-130 aircraft go through its airspace and also gave permission for American “military aircraft, if necessary,” according to an official statement.