OPP have released the names of four young people involved in the Mapleton crash late Friday night. Police say 20-year-old Marko Misic was the piloting the rented Cessna.

His three passengers, 23-year-old Mohammed Shahnawaz Zia of Toronto, 27-year-old Wasay Rizwan of Toronto and 19-years-old Victoria Margaret Luk of Mississauga.

Witnesses say the small plane drifted back and forth and spun in circles before falling out of the night sky and crashing into a cornfield last Friday, resulting in the deaths of four people.

Llori Nicholls was walking her dog with her husband along side road six last night when she saw the plane fall from the sky. She says it was drifting in the air spinning in circles before it came crashing down.” At first we thought maybe it was practicing some tricks, but then we realized that it was in distress.” She says the engine restarted but it was too late.

Prepared to help, the Nicholls family grabbed a first aid kit and sleeping bag from their house and then went looking for the plane.

21-yeard-old Curtis Bults was getting ready to leave for a baseball game when heard the plane go down behind his house.” It sounded like a whiny noise, like a go-kart, like a small plane going 'Eee Eeee Eeeee!,'

"And (then) a couple second delay, and I heard a thud. I heard kind of a shake in the ground." Bults said his two dogs were "absolutely freaking" from the noise, which could be heard clearly even though all the windows in the house were closed. He then jumped onto his ATV to investigate.

He drove it through the adjacent cornfields but couldn't find anything. After about 10 minutes, he returned home.” I heard it but there was no smoke or anything," says Bultz. "There was no smoke at all. That's what you think (that) there'd be something but there was nothing."

Around 8:30 p.m., two of his neighbours arrived, asking to use the phone. "(They said) 'We need to call 911, we just saw a plane spiral to the ground, and we didn't see it come back up because we heard a thud," Bultz says it took him, his neighbours and emergency crews until 10:30 p.m. before they were able to locate the plane wreckage.

Once it was found, his father used a tractor to carve out a path for the emergency crews to get to the scene, he said. "It was the middle of nowhere," says Bultz. "It was in the middle of a 50-acre cornfield."

Visibly shaken and in tears, one of the crash victims’ uncle says, his 20-year-old nephew who was piloting the plane when it went down was "Better than his heart… he was something like… I don’t have words.”

Police have not released names of the victims; it's believed some family members still need to be notified. Their bodies have been transported to Hamilton General hospital for autopsies.

 

Transportation Safety Board is investigating

Officials for the Transportation Safety Board were in Moorefield in Mapleton Township Saturday at the scene of the plane crash.

Ontario Provincial Police say a single-engine Cessna 172 crashed around 8:30 p.m. Friday in a cornfield approximately 50 kilometers northwest of Kitchener.

The three men and one woman were pronounced dead at the scene. One of the victims was a 19-year-old woman. The three others were in their 20s, according to police.

The Transportation Safety Board told CTV News the trip started out as an aerial tour of Toronto and Niagara Falls. Investigator Ken Webster from the TSB says their initial assessment determined the plane came down vertically at a high rate of descent.

Officials say finding the plane was a massive undertaking. Nearby farmers joined with emergency personnel and formed a human grid through a maze of corn and bush.

OPP Const. Keith Robb said the plane went off the radar around 8:20 p.m An emergency transponder signal had been activated. It's unclear how long the plane had been in flight before it crashed.
At this point, the investigation remains in its preliminary stages. "We don't believe weather was a factor," said Robb. "It was a clear, sunny night."

Robb says two investigators from the Transportation Safety Board remain at the scene, and were trying to determine whether mechanical failure is at fault. The plane was expected to be removed from the field later Saturday.

Bob Connors, the general manager of the Waterloo-Wellington Flight Centre, said the plane was a rental Cessna 172.   He says the flight school, which operates out of the Waterloo Region International Airport, had not had a crash like this in a "long, long, long time." Connors would not comment on the experience of the pilot.

With Files from Canadian Press