MYSTERIOUS

Private ‘Ghost Plane’ Crashes Into Baltic Sea as NATO Scrambles Jets

Pilots dispatched to follow the Austrian-registered Cessna 551 on its erratic flight path reported seeing no one in the cockpit.

A private plane believed to have been carrying four people crashed off the coast of Latvia after flight controllers were unable to hail it, Reuters reported Sunday, citing Swedish authorities. Fighter jets were dispatched by Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and NATO’s Baltic air-policing mission to track the Austrian-registered Cessna 551 on its erratic flight path. The pilots reported seeing no one in the cockpit, Swedish official Lars Antonsson said. The plane crashed “when it ran out of fuel,” Antonsson added, according to RTÉ. The aircraft carried a pilot, a man, a woman, and a person described as a daughter, the German outlet Bild reported, without providing a source. It had set off from a southern Spain airfield “without a set destination,” Reuters reported. The plane banked twice, turning at Paris and Cologne, before moving out over the Baltic Sea. Less than five hours after taking off, it was listed by the FlightRadar24 tracking site as rapidly losing speed and altitude, spiraling into the sea. Swedish and Lithuanian forces were on their way to the crash site late Sunday, with Antonsson cautioning that the likelihood of locating survivors was “minimal.”