A weekend that was supposed to end with a group of friends floating back down to earth instead ended in one of the worst aviation disasters France has seen in decades. On Sunday morning, June 28, 2026, a small plane packed with skydivers went down seconds after takeoff near the city of Nancy in the northeastern part of the country. Everyone on board died.
That’s 11 people, including the pilot, gone in under a minute. The whole thing happened so fast that emergency crews who rushed over had no one to save. What makes this one even harder to read about is who was on that plane and who was standing on the ground watching it climb into the sky.
The plane dropped almost straight down
The aircraft took off from the Nancy-Essey airfield around 11 a.m. local time. It barely got off the ground. According to flight tracking data, the plane banked hard to the left after takeoff and came down less than a minute later, about 300 meters from the runway. That’s roughly the length of three football fields.
Yves Seguy, the top government official for the region, said the plane fell “almost vertically.” Not a glide, not a slow descent. Straight down. Tomblaine’s mayor described it the same way, saying it dropped “in a completely unexplained manner” during the climb. The plane hit a grassy strip near a bike path and caught fire on impact.
The students were nurses on a day off
This is the part that’s stuck with a lot of people. The five students on board weren’t thrill chasers or weekend warriors looking for the next stunt. They were independent nurses who had organized the trip together as a way to unwind.
Thierry Pechey, who heads the region’s nursing council, confirmed that the five students were colleagues. “They were colleagues who had decided to go on a first skydiving jump, no doubt to unwind, as we’re going through a difficult time with the heatwave,” he said. France had been baking under high temperatures, and these nurses booked a first-time jump to blow off some steam. It was an introductory tandem session, meaning each beginner would have been strapped to an instructor for the fall.
Along with the five students and five instructors, the pilot rounded out the 11. So the plane held five experienced jumpers and five people who had never done it before, paired up for what should have been the best story they’d tell at work for years.
Families were on the ground watching
Here’s what turns this from a tragedy into something almost unbearable. The friends and relatives of the people on that plane had gathered at the airfield to watch. Some had their phones out, ready to film the tandem jumps. They expected to see parachutes open in the distance.
Mathieu Klein, the mayor of nearby Nancy, said the victims “died in full view of their loved ones, who were preparing to film the tandem skydives.” French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez put it plainly. “Some of the victims’ families witnessed the aircraft falling with their own eyes. So there is tremendous emotion and an even greater psychological trauma,” he said. Medical and psychological support teams were brought in right away, not just for the families but for the witnesses who happened to be nearby.
The plane was a 35-year-old Pilatus PC-6
The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-6 Turbo Porter, a Swiss-built single-engine turboprop. If you’ve ever been to a drop zone, you’ve probably seen one. They’re a workhorse for skydiving outfits all over the world because they climb fast, take off from short runways, and haul a load of jumpers at once.
This particular plane, registered D-FIPS, was built in 1991, making it about 35 years old. It was registered in Germany and had been chartered specifically for the skydiving weekend, which is a common arrangement for these kinds of events. Records show the same aircraft had one prior incident back in 2012 under a different operator, when it hit an obstacle on the ground while taxiing after landing. That was a minor ground bump, nothing close to what happened Sunday.
It barely missed homes and a shopping center
As awful as the death toll is, officials kept coming back to one point. It could have been far worse. The plane went down right on the edge of a built-up neighborhood, close to houses, two roads, and a commercial area.
“Had it occurred just a few dozen meters away, the accident could have caused collateral casualties,” Seguy told reporters. Klein echoed that, saying it was tragic “but it could have been even worse,” pointing out the plane crashed just a few meters from homes. Tomblaine mayor Herve Feron confirmed that no homes were hit. Given how the plane came down nearly vertical in a populated zone, dozens more people on the ground could have been hurt or killed. They weren’t, and that’s about the only piece of good news in the whole story.
Witnesses heard the engine cut out
People in the area described an eerie change in sound moments before the impact. One resident told a French broadcaster he was in his yard when he heard what sounded like the plane’s engine stopping, then a bang right after.
Another witness who was driving at the time told a news agency he saw the plane climbing before it suddenly veered. “Something was clearly wrong,” he said. “By the time I reached the roundabout, circled back and parked near the fire truck, a man was already on the scene trying to put out the flames.” He added that it was obvious there were no survivors. “There was no movement, and it was clear the impact had been too violent for there to be any survivors.” The accounts line up with what officials suspect, that something went wrong with the engine almost immediately after takeoff.
Roughly 50 firefighters responded
Emergency crews moved fast. Around 50 firefighters and a batch of police units were sent to the scene. Police cordoned off the wreckage and put out a message on social media urging people to “strictly avoid” the area around the airport so responders could get in and out without traffic.
Two top government ministers, Interior Minister Nunez and Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot, traveled to the site that same afternoon. Tabarot called it a “terrible tragedy” and said the human toll was “particularly heavy.” He also noted this was France’s deadliest skydiving accident in about 30 years, and several outlets are calling it one of the country’s worst light aircraft incidents on record.
What investigators are looking at now
The cause hasn’t been pinned down. France’s air transport gendarmerie, a specialized unit that handles aviation accidents, opened a technical investigation and its specialists started combing through the wreckage. The Paris prosecutor’s office is leading the broader probe, and investigators in Nancy began collecting witness statements right away.
Amaury Lacote, the deputy public prosecutor in Nancy, said no cause had been determined and no formal finding of mechanical failure had been issued. Seguy described the plane as having suffered a malfunction before it went down, and early signs point to an engine problem, but officials have been careful not to lock in a conclusion before the experts finish. Nunez flat out refused to speculate, saying only that the plane dropped out of the sky suddenly.
A second skydiving crash in two weeks
One detail that jumped out at people following the news: this wasn’t the only deadly skydiving plane crash of the month. Just two weeks earlier, on June 14, a skydiving plane went down moments after takeoff in Butler, Missouri, killing everyone on board.
Reports on the Missouri crash put the death toll at the pilot plus skydivers, with totals listed between 11 and 12 across different accounts. The CNN report on the France crash noted that the Missouri accident revived a longstanding debate over how skydiving planes are regulated. Two crashes that close together, both right after takeoff, both wiping out a full load of jumpers, put that conversation back in the spotlight on both sides of the Atlantic.
For now, the families in Tomblaine are left with the hardest version of grief there is. They drove out to an airfield expecting a fun afternoon, phones ready to capture their friends jumping for the first time. Instead they watched the plane fall. The investigation will take months, and answers about the engine may eventually come. None of that brings back the five nurses, the five instructors, or the pilot who never made it past the first minute of the flight.
