Eleven people have died after a civilian plane carrying skydivers crashed in the eastern French town of Tomblaine, local officials said.
The pilot and all 10 passengers died, including five instructors and five people who were preparing to skydive for the first time.
The plane, which was used by a parachute school, was taking off from Nancy-Essey airfield when it suddenly crashed at around 11:00 local time (10:00 BST).
The Paris prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the cause of the incident, said French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.
Some of the relatives of the victims saw the accident happen, as they had gathered at the airport to watch the tandem jump for the first time, Nuñez said.
The mayor of the nearby town of Nancy, Mathieu Klein, said some of the victims died “in front of their loved ones”.
Chaynesse Khirouni, president of the eastern department in Meurthe-et-Moselle, said that those family members suffered a lot psychologically.
Nuñez said there were “strong emotions” when he visited the crash site, and “great solidarity” with the families of the victims.
Medical and mental health support teams have arrived to care for relatives and other witnesses, he added.
The plane crashed near the edge of the airport, near a residential area and a shopping mall. Local officials say it narrowly missed nearby houses.
“Give or take a few meters and the accident could have caused injuries,” said Yves Seguy, manager of Meurthe-et-Moselle.
He told French broadcaster BFM that the plane fell “almost upside down, in a residential area”.
Half of the skydivers who died were nurses, the president of the local nursing association, Thierry Pechey, told BFM.
“They were my colleagues who had decided to jump for the first time, which will no doubt calm the atmosphere as we are facing a difficult time with the heatwave,” he said.
The accident is the worst accident of a private plane in the history of France, apart from military and business planes, reports the AFP news agency, citing the country’s aviation safety agency BEA.
A witness, who declined to be identified, told Reuters he saw the plane swerve to the right as it passed.
“Something is clearly wrong,” he said.
The man did not see the crash, because of the fence on the side of the road, but he said he heard a noise.
When he arrived at the scene, he tried to help put out the chaos of the burning plane.
“We saw from the start that it was over, they all died instantly. There was no movement, and it was clear that the impact was too violent for there to be any survivors.”
The Mayor of Tomblaine, Hervé Feron, said the plane fell from the sky “in a completely inexplicable way”, adding that it was “too early to try to find explanations”.
“The weather may have played a role, or maybe not, I don’t really know,” he told BFM.
It remains unclear whether the weather was a factor in the crash, and Nuñez declined to speculate ahead of an official investigation.
Like much of Europe, France has been hit by a heat wave in recent days. A brown weather warning for high temperatures was in place for Meurthe-et-Moselle on Sunday.
