A small plane crashed in the front yard of a Colorado home Friday morning, sending neighbors rushing over to pull the four passengers — including two children — from the fiery wreckage, according to a report.
The 1969 Beechcraft 35 hit a fence and a tree before it crashed and burst into flames in a neighborhood in Arvada just outside of Denver around 9:30 a.m., KDVR reported.
Four passengers on board suffered burns and were taken to a local hospital in unknown conditions, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Two of the victims were children, police said.
Witnesses told KDVR that neighbors rushed to help pull people out of the burning plane.
Randy Hamrick and his wife were inside their home when the plane crashed in their yard. At first, they thought a train had derailed across the street.
“We saw the explosion and the glow from the outside and said, well, wait a second,” he said.
Hamrick said he thought his house might collapse.
“It felt like it was falling in. I mean, it was just that violent,” he said.
Neither he nor his wife were injured.
The pilot, who has not been identified, had taken off from Centennial Airport south of Denver to bound for the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport not far from the crash site when he experienced engine problems roughly 15 minutes after departure, officials said.
The pilot called into a Jefferson County air traffic control tower and asked for an emergency landing after seeing a low oil pressure sign illuminate.
Moments later the pilot reported extreme power loss and told the tower they would not make it to the airport and would “put it down” where they could. The tower lost contact with the plane soon after.
Officials said the pilot attempted to land in the street of the residential neighborhood, but the plane’s left wing clipped a large tree causing the plane to skid down the roadway and crash into a truck before it came to a stop in the Hamrics’ front yard.
“I’m sure what was going through the pilot’s mind was ‘I see a roadway, I need to get this aircraft down, let’s give it a shot,’” NTSB accident investigator Alex Lemishko told KDVR.
Video shows responders arriving at the scene where the plane’s wreckage smoldered on the front lawn. It was quickly extinguished but hours later it briefly caught fire again.
