(ProsperNews.net) – Astronaut William Anders has died in a plane crash in Washington. The 90-year-old crashed his single-engine propeller Beechcraft T-34 Mentor aircraft near Puget Sound, in the Evergreen State’s northwestern coast. Video footage, shot by Phillip Person, shows the plane suddenly plummeting. Mr. Person said it “looked like it clipped a wing at first” before rapidly spiraling downward, bursting into flames, breaking apart, and eventually sinking underwater at Puget Sound. “I could not believe what I was seeing,” he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have launched a joint investigation and will recover the aircraft debris to examine tracking data and communications recordings.
Mr. Anders’ son, Air Force Lt. Col. Greg Anders, said, “The family is devastated. He was a great pilot, and we will miss him terribly.”
William Anders was among the Apollo 8 crew that first orbited the moon. He took the famous photo Earthrise on December 24, 1968, and later said it made him see the world entirely differently. From the moon’s distance, Anders remarked that our planet looks like a “small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas tree ornament,” which is equally fragile.
Born in Hong Kong in 1933, Mr. Anders was the son of United States Navy lieutenant Arthur F. Anders and his wife Muriel. The family moved frequently during the astronaut’s childhood and lived in Nanjing, China, when the Sino-Japanese war erupted in 1937. The Japanese invaded China in December of that year, and when their soldiers advanced toward Nanjing, a young William Anders and his mother fled to Guangzhou and later to the Philippines.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Anders joined the US Air Force, completing his training in 1955 and receiving his pilot’s wings a year later. While stationed in Annapolis, Maryland, in the mid-1950s, he met Valerie Elizabeth Hoard, and they married and had six children.
After the military, Anders worked with the National Space Council and became US Ambassador to Norway in 1969.
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