Five bodies recovered from wreckage of ambulance plane

16 August 2015 - 16:35 By RDM News Wire

The bodies of the five people who were killed when an ambulance aircraft from Namibia crashed in a nature reserve near Cape Town on Sunday morning have been recovered from the wreckage and have been taken to a local mortuary‚ Western Cape health department spokesman Mark van der Heever said. He said on ENCA television news that the plane‚ which crashed in the Plattekloof area‚ had gone missing off the radar at around 6.50am on Sunday morning and a call had been received by the province’s emergency control room an hour later."We then dispatched our helicopter to go and search for it. At 8.03am the helicopter arrived in the Plattekloof area and found the wreckage still burning‚" said Van der Heever.He said five people were aboard the plane - two pilots‚ one paramedic‚ one patient and a passenger. All of them were declared dead on the scene.“Investigations are still being done but we think bad weather and poor visibility caused the accident‚” he said.The victims have not yet been identified.The search for the missing plane caused several flight delays to and from Cape Town’s international airport. However a spokesman for the Airports Company of South Africa (ACSA) confirmed that flights had been resumed after the wreckage of the crashed plane was found.Western Cape premier Helen Zille confirmed the crash in a tweet‚ saying the light aircraft had crashed in a nature reserve in the Tygerberg Hills. She said the after the plane had lost radio contact‚ the airport could not risk allowing any more aircraft in the airspace in case of a collision‚ but once the missing plane was located‚ planes were allowed to take off again.One of the flights affected by the delays was flight SA-314 whose passengers included former Proteas cricketer Herschelle Gibbs and cricket commentator Neil Manthorp.Gibbs tweeted: “Waiting to take off and captain says the radars all over the country have gone down and they busy searching for one aircraft at present”.In a separate tweet‚ Manthorp stated: “Radar systems down across the country...one plane missing in Western Cape...encouraging words from captain of SA314 as we wait.”..

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