Plane nearly stalled before crash

WASHINGTON — A business jet that crashed in a neighborhood near an airport in suburban Washington, killing all three people on board and a mother and her two young sons on the ground, had slowed to the point where it nearly stalled in midair before impact, federal investigators said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the father of the two young boys who were killed along with their mother said his family had suffered an indescribable loss. The crash sparked a fireball that gutted the family’s home in Gaithersburg, Md., and police said Marie Gemmell died while trying to protect her sons, 3-year-old Cole and 1-month-old Devin, from the smoke and flames.

“No words can describe the enormity of our loss and sadness,” Ken Gemmell said in statement emailed to The Associated Press. “We lost Marie, the love of my life and college sweetheart, and our two young, innocent and joyful sons — a loss that no person should ever endure.”

Gemmell and the couple’s daughter, Arabelle, were not home at the time of the crash. He asked for privacy while they grieve and try to rebuild their lives.

Shortly before impact, the plane had slowed to just over 100 mph, and its computers began sounding an alarm about an impending aerodynamic stall, National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said Tuesday after a preliminary review of the plane’s flight data recorder.

Sumwalt said he had not listened to the cockpit voice recorder personally and did not summarize anything the pilot said before the crash. According to the data recorder and witnesses interviewed by the NTSB, the plane pitched and rolled severely in the seconds before the crash, he said. There was no indication from the data recorder that the plane had engine trouble.

There were also no reports of birds near the plane, Sumwalt said.