On Thursday evening, flight instructor Azizullah Yoosufani climbed into a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza with two of his students for a routine training exercise out of Markham's Buttonville Airport.
The 26-year-old was a little more than two years into a coveted teaching job at Seneca College, the same school at which he had studied aviation and won a raft of awards.
He was also little over a month away from celebrating his wedding, which his parents, who divide their time between Canada from Pakistan, had prolonged their stay in Toronto to help organize.
Mr. Yoosufani and his students, Cynthia Hoi-Mei Tsang and Lloyd Myles Cripps, both 20-year-old third-years, crossed part of Durham Region in their small plane, then turned back toward the airport. Around 7 p.m., it dropped off the radar.
Officials at Pearson International Airport notified Durham Regional Police. From a helicopter, they found the wreckage of the plane in a farmer's field near Whitevale Road, south of Highway 407 in northern Pickering. All three were pronounced dead at the scene by an airborne ambulance team.
Earlier that day, Farman Yoosufani had been preparing for his older brother's wedding reception on Dec. 26, planning speeches and preparing a slideshow.
Late in the evening, he heard the news.
"My first reaction was denial - 'No, it can't be,'" he said. "We talk every day."
As friends gathered at the family's North York apartment Friday, Farman Yoosufani, 24, recalled his brother as a gregarious man, someone with the ability to strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone.
"Regardless of if it was a 60-year-old man, he would be best friends with them," he said. "He went out of his way to make people happy."
And, of course, there was his love of aviation. Azizullah Yoosufani had been fascinated with planes since childhood, spurred on by his father's job as a pilot for Pakistan International Airlines.
"Most of the time when you sat down to talk with him, he'd want to talk about planes," his brother said.
Azizullah Yoosufani, the second-youngest in a family of four brothers and a sister, graduated from Seneca's flight degree program with honours in 2008. That summer, he returned to his alma mater as an instructor.
"He was a great role model for other students. He had a very strong work ethic; he was kind and thoughtful. He was a decent person with the full meaning of the word," said Adel Labib, a Seneca aviation professor, in a statement.
As a student, Mr. Yoosufani was always willing to help out his peers, whether with homework or giving them a ride, remembered Jack Allalouf, who studied with him at Seneca. An instructor identified him as someone who would make a good teacher, helping him land the highly-coveted instructor job.
"Once he got into Seneca, he went out of his way to help others get in," said Mr. Allalouf, who now flies medical personnel around northern Manitoba. "It's one of those sought-after jobs."
Braeden Henderson, a classmate of Ms. Tsang and Mr. Cripps at Seneca, said Mr. Yoosufani trained him during his first year.
"He was a great guy, he was calm, he knew what he was doing," he said. "I never saw him get angry; he was one of the best instructors there."
In a statement, the school said Ms. Tsang was a leading student who had passed her commercial pilot written exam and flight test and made the president's honour list.
"Cynthia was one of the most polite students I ever taught at Seneca, and she had such great spirit," Mr. Labib said.
Mr. Cripps had also passed his tests and was training to become an instructor. A dual Canadian-British citizen, he had hoped to fly in Europe after he finished school, Seneca said. On his Facebook page, he listed his hometown as Writtle, an English village an hour's drive northeast of London, and his high school as Heart Lake Secondary in Brampton.
At Seneca, where flags flew at half-mast Thursday, the school announced a private memorial service for all three next week.
In Pickering, meanwhile, investigators from the Transportation Safety Board spent the day combing through the wreckage, which lay crumpled, with pieces of debris scattered across the field. So far, they have not discovered what caused the crash.
"All we know is that the aircraft struck the ground at a steep angle and a high velocity," investigator Peter Machete told reporters at the scene. "It's pretty well broken up."