For several hours and thousands of miles, the Learjet, which was on autopilot, soared through the sky heading northwest across the U.S. until it ran out of fuel and spiraled down nose-first into a pasture near Mina, leaving a smoking crater 10 feet deep and 20 feet wide, according to Knight Ridder. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined the plane had failed to pressurize — the frosted windows were a telltale sign — and the two pilots and four passengers were likely rendered unconscious due to the lack of oxygen in the plane once it reached a certain altitude. By the time the plane crashed, they may have already been dead, per PennLive and The Washington Post.
The phenomenon is known as hypoxia and the people inside the Learjet, including the pilots, Stephanie Bellegarrigue and Michael Kling, would have had very little time, perhaps as little as nine seconds, to put on their oxygen masks before passing out, per Knight Ridder. "Once you shut the brain down, the rest of the body follows," a corporate pilot trainer, Lee Murray, told the news agency at the time of the crash.
