Six people, including a child, died when a small plane crashed in central Wisconsin near a state park, officials said Oct. 14.
The Sauk County Sheriff's Office, in a news release, said the agency responded to reports of a downed aircraft in a wooded area near Mirror Lake State Park the night of Oct. 13.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told USA TODAY that the plane crashed about 9:50 p.m. local time near Reedsburg.
According to online flight tracking tool FlightAware, the plane left Kenosha Regional Airport shortly before 9 p.m.
A preliminary investigation revealed that the aircraft − a fixed-wing Piper flying a return trip from Kenosha to Menomonie − had five adults and one child on board, the sheriff's office said.
The plane was flying
at 24,000 feet when the pilot contacted air traffic control to report icing and asked to descend, according to preliminary information from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Air traffic control approved the descent, and the plane "entered a right descending turn that increased in rate until communications and data tracking were lost," NTSB said.
In a separate post on Facebook, the sheriff's office wrote that investigators were "working to learn what the content of those transmissions were and if a weather event in the area may have played any role in the crash."
The sheriff's office said it notified the FAA and NTSB to investigate why the plane went down.
As of Oct. 14, the identities of those killed in the crash had not been released.
Contributing: Kelli Arseneau with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Natalie Neysa Alund is a senior reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on X @nataliealund.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Six die in Wisconsin plane crash near state park
