William Anders, an astronaut on the first lunar orbit mission, died when the plane he was piloting crashed off the San Juan Islands in Washington state on Friday.
“The family is devastated. He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly,” retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Greg Anders told AP, confirming the death of his father.
In a video shared on social media, the plane is seen coming out of a loop and impacting the water before bursting into flames.
US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records and flight data confirm the 90-year-old’s vintage Air Force T-34 Mentor airplane crashed, FOX 13 Seattle wrote on Friday. The FAA told the New York Post that the pilot was the only person aboard the plane.
The US Coast Guard Pacific Northwest stated on Friday that they responded to reports of a plane going down sometime before 11:45am between Orcas and Jones Island. They are conducting search and rescue efforts alongside San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, Air Station Bellingham, and Air Station Port Angeles, the agency wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday.
Retired Major General Anders was the photographer behind the iconic ‘Earthrise’ shot of the Earth in the background of the lunar landscape, taken while on the US Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission in 1968.
Born in 1933 in Hong Kong, Anders grew up in San Diego, California. He studied nuclear engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology. Part of his duties on Apollo 8 involved radiation shielding, measuring radiation levels, and the environmental control system. He was the command module pilot for the Apollo 8 mission.