F-16 fighter planes of the US Armed Forces intercepted this Sunday the device that crashed in the vicinity of Washington DCafter the pilot did not respond to attempts to contact him.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) reported in a statement that the F-16s They used flares to get the pilot’s attention.without responding, until his plane was intercepted at around 3:20 p.m. local time (7:20 p.m. GMT).

“In coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, NORAD’s F-16 fighter jets responded to a Cessna 560 Citation V aircraft“, which did not respond to their signals and which was flying over Washington and Virginia, the note points out.

NORAD explained that the F-16s flew “at supersonic speeds”, so it is possible that the inhabitants of the area heard “a sonic boom”; a roar that was heard in parts of the capital. After unsuccessfully trying to get the attention of the Cessna pilot with flares, military planes intercepted the aircraft. “The pilot was unresponsive and consequently the Cessna crashed near the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. NORAD tried to contact the pilot until the plane crashed,” the text states.

A White House official pointed out in a statement that President Joe Biden, who was playing golf this Sunday with his brother near Joint Base Andrews, on the outskirts of the capital, in Maryland, has been informed about this incident and added that the sound coming from The planes were faintly heard in the area where the president was.

The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed in a statement that the Cessna aircraftwith a capacity of up to 12 passengers, crashed at around 3:30 p.m. local time (19:03 GMT) in a “mountainous area” near Montebello, Virginia.

The FAA, which is investigating the crash, said the plane was destined for MacArthur Airport on Long Island, in the state of New York, and that he had left the city of Elizabethton, in Tennessee, in the south of the country. The Department of Security of the city of Washington, where both the residence of the US president and the headquarters of the country’s Congress and other institutions are located, told its inhabitants shortly after the alarms went off due to the noise that was heard in the capital that there was no active threat.

The Annapolis (Maryland) emergency office stressed on its Twitter account that the noise was “caused by an authorized Department of Defense flight“by breaking the sound barrier and reaching supersonic speed.