In the weeks before their family trip to Costa Rica, Bruce and Irene Steinberg of Scarsdsale, N.Y., told friends and family how excited they were to take their three sons on an adventure through that country’s lush forests and tropical beaches.
After visiting the Pacific coast, the Steinbergs were headed on Sunday to Costa Rica’s capital for the last stop of their trip. But the single-engine plane carrying them, five other Americans and two Costa Rican pilots crashed that afternoon into a mountain shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board, the authorities said.
Officials in Guanacaste, a popular region on the Pacific coast for tourists, responded to reports shortly after noon of smoke and flames rising from a wooded area near Punta Islita Airport. Emergency responders found the charred wreckage of a Cessna plane operated by the regional airline Nature Air and the burned remains of those who had been on board.
“The government of Costa Rica deeply regrets the death of 10 American passengers and two Costa Rican pilots in the aircraft crash,” Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, the country’s president, said in a Facebook post on Sunday evening.
The State Department said it was aware of the crash and was working with the aviation authorities in Costa Rica. “We express our condolences to all those affected by this tragedy,” a spokeswoman said in an email.
A sister of Mr. Steinberg confirmed Sunday night in a Facebook post that her brother and his family had died in the crash. A relative who answered the phone at Mr. Steinberg’s parents’ home in Florida confirmed that the Steinbergs lived in Scarsdale, a suburb north of New York City, with their sons William, Zachary and Matthew.
Ms. Kaller said she immediately called the man, who told her that the plane the family was on had crashed after takeoff, but she did not believe him until her son found a news story online about the accident.
In the hours after the crash, Ms. Kaller said that an official with a United States consulate in Costa Rica also contacted her about the crash. The Steinbergs had many friends in Scarsdale, she said, so why the rabbi and government official contacted her had become another mystery in Sunday’s tragedy.
Mr. Steinberg worked in investment banking, and Ms. Steinberg volunteered at many nonprofits, Ms. Kaller said. She said she met Ms. Steinberg about 14 years ago when Matthew Steinberg and her son, Noah, attended nursery school at Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale.
Matthew was an eighth-grader at a private school, William attended the University of Pennsylvania and Zachary was at Johns Hopkins University, Ms. Kaller said. She said that their parents made an effort to expose them to cultures all over the world. Last year, it was a trip to Asia, and the latest was the vacation to Costa Rica.
“Irene and Bruce felt very strongly about providing that kind of culture and enrichment for their children,” she said in an interview.
Aviation and security officials in Costa Rica told local news media on Sunday that the cause of the crash was unknown but that the Nature Air plane encountered inclement weather on Sunday when it first tried to land in Punta Islita to pick up the American passengers. The plane returned to another airport before it eventually landed in Punta Islita around 11 a.m., the country’s civil aviation director told the newspaper El Mundo.
After the pilots picked up the American passengers, the plane took off for San José, the capital, which is about 140 miles east, the authorities said. Photos posted by government officials on Facebook show that the Cessna plane crashed several hundred yards from the end of a runway at Punta Islita Airport.
Laura Chinchilla, the president of Costa Rica from 2010 to 2014, said on Twitter that her cousin was one of the crew members killed in the crash.
Costa Rica, particularly its pristine beaches and mountains on the Pacific coast, is popular with North American and European tourists. More tourists visit Costa Rica from America than any other country. Eco-tourism is a major draw, and Nature Air bills itself as the first carbon-neutral airline in the world.
In September, an American and another passenger on a Nature Air flight died when a single-engine Cessna crashed in a river in Guanacaste. Another American on the flight was injured.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com
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