San Diego
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A few hours after a plane collapsed in a district of San Diego on Thursday, the smell of fuel from the jet remained thick in the air while the investigators traveled the area so that clues discover what caused the plane, killing several people.
The Jet Business first struck a power line, then was subjected to houses in a community of military housing in San Diego just before 4 am on Thursday, the authorities announced. The debris field measures at least a quarter of a mile along the other side of the residential street, where the jet fuel has rained, lighting several cars and damaging the others up to several houses on the main accident site.
A few hours later, the sun rose on the charred ruins of a seriously damaged house of the plane, which searched a hole in the side of the house and collapsed its roof on a car below.
Before crashing in the neighborhood, the plane hit the power lines about two kilometers from the executive airport near Montgomery-Gibbs, according to Eliott Simpson, a main investigator on aviation accidents for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is investigating the accident.
“There are fragments of the plane under the electric lines,” Simpson told journalists on Thursday afternoon.
Visibility at a neighboring airport had fallen for half a thousand with low cloud ceilings at the time of the accident, Meteorological observation data shows.
Six people were on the plane, according to a update of the Federal Aviation Administration. San Diego police have confirmed at least two deaths – and the deputy chief of San Diego fires, Dan Eddy, said that he seemed unlikely that passengers could have survived the accident.
The music agency Sound Talent Group said that three of its employees, including the co-founder Dave Shapiro, died in the accident, the Associated Press reported on Thursday. The agency did not appoint the two other deceased employees.
CNN contacted Sound Talent Group for more information.
“We are deeply saddened to learn the death of Dave Shapiro and his two colleagues,” a national spokesman independent talents told CNN, a commercial organization that represents independent talent agencies and managers across the country, CNN in a statement.
“Dave was a visionary in the music industry and a founding partner of Sound Talent Group,” said the press release.
Shapiro, which has a pilot license, is listed as the owner of the plane, according to the Associated Press and recordings FAA.
The house directly affected by the plane had been occupied at the time of the accident, but the neighbors helped the family evacuate, Eddy said at a press conference Thursday afternoon.
“For me, it’s a bit of a miracle,” he said. “I know that the neighbors helped them go out and it is the beauty of what I also like in this neighborhood,” added Eddy, “the military who lean for each other.”
Scott Wahl, San Diego police chief, said he was still struggling to describe the scene that his crews met when they arrived early Thursday morning.
“I can’t really put words to describe what this scene looked like, but with the jet fuel flowing in the streets and all on fire at the same time, it was quite horrible to see,” he said at the press conference.
The plane, an Cessna 550 plane often called a quote, crashed near the Montgomery executive airport around 3:45 am Thursday, the San Diego fire service said in CNN. The private jet is commonly used for business trips and can transport eight to ten people.
Starting from Teterboro, New Jersey, Wednesday evening around 11:15 p.m., the plane made a fuel stop in Wichita, Kansas, before crashing, according to Simpson.
The NTSB will spend Thursday and Friday on the scene to document the accident site and plans to recover the plane from a secure location on Saturday, Simpson said. This plane probably has a flight data recorder and perhaps a cockpit voice recorder, he said.
A preliminary report will be published on the NTSB website in about two weeks and a final report will be published in around 12 to 18 months.
CNN Aviation Safety analyst David Soucie said he was worried because Cessna quote planes are generally considered to be “one of the most reliable planes”.
Although he expects the FAA investigation conclusions – especially if the fog could have played a role – Soucie said that the presence of jet fuel on the ground seems to indicate that the plane was not short of gas.
He warned that he could also take a while to determine the number of people aboard the plane.
“It’s really difficult, given the level of damage, I don’t want to be too gloomy on this subject, to identify the number of people on the plane,” he said. “It can therefore take a little time by considering damage to the plane.”
More than 10 houses were affected by the accident, Eddy said at the conference. “As the jet fuel was dropping, it removed each car,” he said.
A video captured by a neighborhood resident who asked to stay anonymous shows flames peeling off vehicles bordering the two sides of the street shortly after the accident, while their car alarms were going up.
The video shows fire houses after the jet crashed in the San Diego district.
The resident told CNN that they had been awakened by a strong boom and that their house was starting to tremble. The man ran out to see the whole street in fire and caught a pipe to start pulverizing his courtyard, he said, then he decided to evacuate the area.
He told CNN that he also helped the police knock on the doors of his neighbors so that they can evacuate.
Captain Robert Hely, commander of the Naval base San Diego, said that the district is “one of the largest military housing in the world”.
“Admittedly, we have many families of soldiers who are affected,” said Hely, before adding her condolences to the families of those aboard the plane.
The mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, has promised that the city will continue to support people affected.
“They are part of a military community that make up our city – proud partners of our community – and we will support them as long as it would take to make sure that we will come back here,” he said.
The San Diego Humane Society took at least 12 pets affected by the accident on Thursday, including several dogs whose fur has been sprayed with fuel to jets.
A Publish Shows that the Humane Society medical team has put on danger combinations to decontaminate and wash animals.
The plane pilot interviewed air traffic controllers on the weather in the Montgomery Gibbs field when the aircraft came down to 9,000 feet, but the airport automated meteorological system was not operating, according to air traffic control records.
“The Montgomery Asos is out of service,” the controller told the pilot. The National Weather Service indicates that the automated airport surface observation system, which provides weather updates every minute, 24/7, has stopped working a little more than a day before the accident.
“I just want to see what I’m here,” the driver told an audio controller recorded by Liveatc.net.
“I have automated Miramar time,” said the controller on the radio and provided him with the conditions of the navy aerodrome – about 3 miles from there: visibility of half a thousand and a 200 -foot cloud ceiling.
“Very well, it doesn’t sound very well, but we will try,” replied the pilot.
An alternative airport had “a little better but not much,” said the controller. The pilot noted that it was “not an excellent option either” because there were highest minimum weather requirements to land there.
The meteorological minimums indicate the weather conditions authorized for flight operations, dictating the required visibility, the clearance of clouds and other weather factors to which the pilots must adhere to a safe flight.
Shortly after, the pilot announced on the radio, the plane was 3 miles from a landing planned on track 28 of Montgomery-Gibbs, according to the audio recording.
There was no sign of a declared problem or emergency.
The airport has a control tower, but it does not have staff overnight, so the pilots announce their intentions to any other pilot listening to the “frequency of counseling in circulation”.
The quote, according to FAA Records, was Built in 1985.
Derek Van Dam de CNN, Monica Garrett, Alexandra Skores, Alaa Elassar, Taylor Galgano and Amanda Musa contributed to this report.