(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The family of an NRA executive died tragically Sunday afternoon after their private jet spiraled out of control over Washington, D.C., eventually crashing in the Virginia mountains, the Daily Mail reported.
Barbara Rumpel, a businesswoman and member of the NRA Women’s Leadership Forum from Florida, said that her 49-year-old daughter and 2-year-old granddaughter were killed, alongside the girl’s nanny and the pilot after the plane apparently depressurized for reasons that remain unclear.
The crash left no survivors.
“My family is gone, my daughter and granddaughter,” Rumpel lamented in a Facebook post.
Tragically, the Rumpels lost another daughter, Victoria, in a 1994 scuba-diving accident at the age of 19, the New York Post reported.
After losing all contact with the jet, which was in restricted airspace over the nation’s capital city, the Pentagon sent an interceptor fighter jet after it, which caused a supersonic boom over the city.
According to Rumpel, her daughter, Adina Azarian, was returning home to New York after a visit to North Carolina.
Flight data trackers indicated that the plan spiraled out of control during a rapid descent into the wilderness of the Shenandoah Valley.
John Rumpel, the father, told reporters that he knew nothing about the crash yet, and that an investigation would ensue.
“We know nothing about the crash,” noted the Florida businessman and Trump campaign donor. “We are talking to the FAA now.”
The Virginia State Police said that they were alerted of a possible crash Sunday afternoon, prompting a search of the wilderness area.
“At 3:50 p.m. Sunday (June 4, 2023), the Virginia State Police was notified of a possible aircraft crash in the Staunton/Blue Ridge Parkway region,” a spokesperson said, adding that first responders reached the crash site “shortly before 8 p.m.” on foot.
The spokesperson also said that the police soon thereafter gave up the search for survivors.
Though the cause of the crash is not clear, incidents involving unresponsive pilots are not infrequent, particularly when plane cabins lose pressure, leaving passengers and pilots alike unconscious.
Some preliminary speculation focused on hypoxia, or a lack of oxygen in the cabin.
“The pressure should keep enough air in the cabin to stay alert and stay awake,” aviation expert Steve Ganyard told ABC News. “In this case, it can happen insidiously where you lose consciousness, you begin to feel tingling, you get a sense of euphoria and it very slowly overcomes the people in the cabin.”
Some reports indicated that the plane may have made it as far as Long Island before doing a U-turn and returning southward, where it remained on autopilot before running out of fuel.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
