Private Plane Crashes Off Coast of Latvia
A private Cessna plane crashed off the coast of Latvia on Sunday evening, Sweden’s rescue service said, after NATO scrambled jets to follow its erratic course.
The Austrian-registered Cessna 551 aircraft was flying from Jerez in southern Spain, from where it took off at 12:56 GMT without a set destination, according to FlightRadar24 website.
It turned twice, at Paris and Cologne, before heading straight out over the Baltic, passing near the Swedish island of Gotland. At 17:37 GMT it was listed on the flight tracker as rapidly losing speed and altitude.
“We’ve learned that the plane has crashed [in the ocean] north-west of the town of Ventspils in Latvia,” a spokesperson for Sweden’s rescue service said. “It has disappeared from the radar.”…