A high-achieving family of doctors and scientists was wiped out in a plane crash en route to celebrate a birthday and Passover in the Catskills in Upstate New York.

The Mitsubishi MU2B aircraft went down just after midday on Saturday in a field in Copake, killing all six people on board.

The victims were identified on Sunday as Karenna Groff, a former MIT soccer player and NCAA’s 2022 woman of the year, her boyfriend and MIT graduate James Santoro, Karenna’s father and neuroscientist Dr. Michael Groff, as well as her mother and urogynecologist Dr. Joy Saini.

James’s father, John Santoro, told the Associated Press: ‘They were a wonderful family.

‘The world lost a lot of very good people who were going to do a lot of good for the world if they had the opportunity. We’re all personally devastated.’