What happened three minutes after it started? In Milan, people are puzzled over a mysterious plane crash: the private jet of a Romanian multi-billionaire crashed into an industrial building in San Donato Milanese on Sunday, exploded and tore a crater in the house – all eight occupants were killed. And the investigators wonder what could have happened between turn two and three in the cloudy sky over the city.
The first two had still been normal: the plane, a Pilatus PC-12, took off from the city airport of Milano Linate shortly after 1 p.m., then turned north twice as planned. Then the plane should head south, towards Sardinia – destination: Olbia. But she turned north one more time. The control tower asked why, but it was too late by then.
In the cockpit sat real estate tycoon Dan Petrescu, 67 years old, a reserved man, estimated assets: three billion euros. He was an experienced pilot. The machine, built in 2015, belonged to him and was registered in Romania. Petrescu didn’t give the tower a mayday before the crash. It was therefore initially assumed that the pilot suddenly felt uncomfortable or might have lost his bearings in the storm. The Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera reports, citing anonymous sources, that the flight controllers discovered an anomaly on the radar and asked the pilot whether he was avoiding turbulence. “No”, Petrescu is said to have replied. Then there was radio silence.
Machine crashes into an empty building
Eyewitnesses reported that the plane had already burned and lurched in the air when it then fell “vertically into the depths”. The tank was full, and the explosion after the impact was correspondingly dramatic. Little luck in big misfortune: the building is currently being converted and because it was Sunday there were no workers on the construction site. The street was also empty, no one was waiting at the nearby bus stop. The name of the street fits almost fatefully symbolically into this tragedy: Via 8 Ottobre 2001 is named after an airplane accident exactly 20 years ago. At that time, an MD-87 of the Scandinavian airline SAS collided with a private jet in Linate, 118 people died, only one passenger survived.
On board the Pilatus PC-12, which had been in the hangar in Linate since the end of September, ready for the excursion to Sardinia, there were members of two families who were friends. They had probably got together for a christening ceremony. In addition to Petrescu, his wife and son and a Canadian friend, a northern Italian manager, his Romanian wife, their 20-month-old child and his grandmother were also killed. Petrescu once fled Romania to Germany during the Ceacescus regime and after returning home in 1989 he built an empire with luxury properties, supermarkets and shopping malls.