Ex-Drummer’s Final Cockpit Selfie Before Fatal Jet Crash
Here’s the thing: ex-Devil Wears Prada drummer Daniel Williams dropped some eerily calm cockpit snaps mere hours before the private jet he was on went down in a deadly crash. The photos—shared to his Instagram Story around 6:45 p.m. ET on March 12—show Williams casually leaning over the controls of a sleek Cessna Citation 560, sunlight glinting off the instrument panel. Less than four hours later, the very same craft plunged near Lake Country Airport in British Columbia, killing everyone aboard, according to an NTSB preliminary report.
Williams, who left the metalcore outfit in 2018, had been planning a short trip to Vancouver for a studio session with producer Kara “KJ” Doyle. Posting under the handle @DWillsBeats, he captioned one image “Cleared for takeoff,” then added a second shot of the altitude gauge reading 35,000 feet with a shrug emoji. It wasn’t the first time Williams invited fans into his musician-on-the-move life: he’s known for behind-the-scenes glimpses of tour buses, backstage lounges and ritzy airport lounges, but this cockpit content now feels downright ominous.
Flight records obtained by People and confirmed by federal filings show tail number N560KP departed Vancouver at 7:02 p.m. local time, bound for Seattle. About 20 minutes later, the aircraft disappeared from radar. Search crews located the wreckage at dawn the next day, scattered across a wooded hillside six miles east of the runway. “There was no distress call,” said Capt. Laura Mitchell of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. “The jet just dropped off our screens.” Autopsy and toxicology reports are pending, but early findings rule out weather as the primary cause; the skies were clear and visibility high.
Corroborating sources at TMZ and Rolling Stone note that Williams had recently been tweeting about his excitement for an upcoming EP, so it’s especially tragic that those final images now read like foreboding postcards. His bandmates posted a joint statement on X (formerly Twitter) on March 15: “Dan was more than a drummer—he was our brother and the heartbeat of so many shows. We are devastated.” Meanwhile, fans have flooded social media with tributes, using hashtags like #RIPDanWilliams and #CWTP (Cockpit With The Pros).
Investigators say they’ll comb through maintenance logs, pilot certifications and flight data recorders before pinpointing a cause. In the meantime, those haunting selfies remain a chilling time capsule. If this trend of near-prophetic posts keeps up, can any in-flight photo ever just be an Instagram flex? Anyway, that’s the deal. Do with it what you will.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and New York Post, People Magazine, Transportation Safety Board of Canada
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
