A small aircraft carrying a group of skydivers crashed on Sunday morning near the city of Nancy in northeastern France, killing all 11 people onboard in what authorities described as the country's deadliest general aviation accident on record. The plane went down at around 11am shortly after taking off from Nancy-Essey aerodrome, coming to rest on a grassy area near a road on the outskirts of Tomblaine, a suburb of Nancy in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department.
The dead included the pilot, five skydiving instructors and five student parachutists. The students were nurses who had organised the jump as a group outing. Thierry Pechey, head of Meurthe-et-Moselle's nursing council, confirmed their identities and said they had chosen the activity to relieve stress. "They were colleagues who had decided to go on a first skydiving jump, no doubt to unwind, as we're going through a difficult time with the heatwave," he said. The jump was planned as a series of tandem dives — a format in which a first-time jumper is harnessed to an instructor for the descent. The aircraft, a Pilatus registered in Germany, had been chartered specifically for the skydiving weekend.
Witnesses described the plane falling almost vertically shortly after takeoff. A local resident told broadcaster BFM-TV that he heard the engine cut out, followed immediately by a loud impact. Tomblaine's mayor, Hervé Féron, said the aircraft appeared to fall "straight down" in what he called a "completely unexplained manner during the ascent." The crash narrowly avoided a residential area; Meurthe-et-Moselle prefect Yves Séguy noted that had the plane come down just a few dozen metres further, there could have been casualties on the ground. No one outside the aircraft was hurt. Making the crash especially harrowing, some of the victims' family members had gathered at the airfield to watch and film the jumps, and witnessed the plane fall from the sky.
France's BEA aviation safety agency classified the incident as "the most serious general aviation accident in terms of loss of life" in the country, excluding military and commercial aviation. Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said there had been no comparable parachuting accident in French aeronautics for around 30 years. Both he and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez visited the crash site. A technical investigation has been opened by the deputy public prosecutor in Nancy, though the cause of the crash has not yet been determined. Emergency medical teams, firefighters, police and mental health professionals were all deployed to the scene, with psychological support made available to the relatives and witnesses who had watched the accident unfold.