IU MOURNS

Five IU music students are dead after the small airplane carrying them crashed just south of Monroe County Airport late Thursday night.\nRobert Samels, Zachary Novak, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi and Chris Carducci were killed after their six-seat Cessna crashed while attempting to land late Thursday night.\nAll five victims were students in the Jacobs School of Music and were returning home from a community choir rehearsal in Lafayette. Joshi, who was a licensed pilot, was flying the plane. \nThe students were on private business for the trip, said IU President Adam Herbert. The plane is owned by Yatish Air, LLC and licensed out of South Bend.\nSeveral people who identified themselves as being affiliated with the Jacobs School of Music showed up at the Van Buren Township Fire Station, the command center for the crash investigation, early Friday morning. Jacobs School of Music Dean Gwyn Richards was unavailable for comment Friday because he was consoling the families of the lost students, Herbert said at a press conference Friday afternoon.\nEmergency officials said the single-engine plane was traveling from Lafayette to Bloomington late Thursday night when it disappeared from the radar at about 11:40 p.m. The disappearance coincided with several calls to the Monroe County 911 dispatcher of a plane in distress near Monroe County Airport. Though the pilot had activated the landing lights at the airport, it never made it to the runway.\nInitial attempts to locate the wreckage of the crash on foot were unsuccessful, but Civil Air Patrol search crews picked up an emergency transponder pulse emitted by the plane when they flew over the crash site. \nRescuers -- hampered by fog and the dense woods of the crash site -- found the plane at about 4:15 a.m. Friday.\nA make-shift road, muddy from rainfall, marked the crash site of the students' single-engine airplane. The woods where it crashed were so dense airport officials had to hire a crew with heavy machinery to clear a path to the wreckage. \nMembers of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, wearing blue one-piece overalls and yellow rubber boots, worked into the night. \nInvestigators believe the craft hit the ground nose-down, said Ed Malinowski of the National Transportation Safety Board. There was no evidence of a fire on board the plane.\nAll five people on board died on impact from blunt force trauma, said Monroe County Deputy Coroner Nicole Meyer Friday afternoon. \nThe craft was a 1978 Cessna U206G, according the police radio reports. \nEight fire departments, three law enforcement agencies and the Civil Air Patrol responded to the incident, said Van Buren Deputy Fire Chief Mike Cornman.\nHelicopters were not immediately able to move into the area because of the inclement weather conditions, Cornman said.\nMalinowski, an air safety investigator, said he would have a preliminary crash report published within a week and said the investigation should be completed in about six months to one year. As of Friday night, Malinowski said he was looking at pilot error, the weather and the condition of the airplane as possible causes of the crash.\nIU spokesman Larry MacIntyre said the students were participating in the Bach Chorale group in Lafayette Thursday in preparation for a performance Saturday night.\nSeveral family members of the crash victims visited the wreckage of the plane Friday night with University officials and FAA and NTSB investigators.