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Owatonna: A small jet crashed while preparing to land on Thursday at a regional airport in Minnesota, killing eight people, including casino and construction executives.
Authorities initially thought nine people may have been aboard the Raytheon Hawker 800, which went down about 9:30 a.m. about 60 miles south of the Twin Cities.
But by late evening, Department of Public Safety spokesman Doug Neville said it had been confirmed that eight people were on board.
The plane was carrying two pilots. Seven people were dead at the scene. One died later at a hospital.
Severe weather had been moving through southern Minnesota earlier Thursday, but witnesses and the National Weather Service said the storms were subsiding at the time of the crash.
The charter jet, flying from Atlantic City, N.J., to Owatonna, a town of 25,000, went down in a cornfield northwest of Degner Regional Airport, Sheriff Gary Ringhofer said. The wreckage was not visible to reporters because tall corn obscured the crash site.
The debris was scattered 500 feet beyond the airport's runway. Late Thursday, the Dakota County coroner was on the scene working to identify victims.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigating team will look at a variety of factors, such as the plane structure and weather, said John Lovell, the investigator in charge.
A cockpit voice recorder and a flight management system were recovered and sent to be analyzed, the NTSB said.
Cameron Smith, a mechanic at the airport, said he spoke by radio with the jet's pilot just minutes before the crash. The pilot was about to land and was asking where he should park for fuel, Smith said.
He ran to the crash scene to see if anyone could be helped, but saw only a long skid path and debris that he described as "shredded."
He said: "There was no fuselage. There were just parts."
Charter company East Coast Jets confirmed the two pilots were its employees: Clark Keefer of Bethlehem, Pa., and Dan D'Ambrosio of Hellertown, Pa., in a statement on its Web site.
The only passenger publicly identified by late evening was Karen Sandland, 44, a project manager on the Revel casino project who worked out of Tishman Construction's Newark, N.J. office, company spokesman Bud Perrone said. She was the only Tishman employee on board, said Richard M. Kielar, the company's senior vice president.
Atlantic City Mayor Scott Evans said two high-ranking Revel executives also were among the victims, but he declined to identify them.
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