August 19 - 2 Killed in Small-Plane Crash on Long Island

[MorrisBX]

A small plane carrying three people crashed on Sunday in a residential neighborhood on Long Island, killing a man and a woman onboard and injuring another man, the Suffolk County police said.
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No one on the ground was hurt, but people near the crash site, in Shirley, N.Y., rushed to help those trapped onboard as the plane burned, the police said.

The plane crashed around noon shortly after taking off from Brookhaven Calabro Airport, which is about a mile away, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It hit the ground near the corner of Helene Avenue and Crestwood Drive, narrowly missing several homes.

One of three people on the plane, Jane Unhjem, 60, of Goshen, N.Y., died at Stony Brook Hospital. Erik Unhjem, 61, also of Goshen, was in serious condition at the hospital, the police said. (His relationship to Jane Unhjem was not immediately known.) The name of the man who died in the crash had not been released as of Sunday night.

A neighbor said she was sitting in her backyard on Crestwood Drive when she saw the plane zoom over her head. “It crashed 100 feet from where I was standing,” the neighbor, who declined to give her full name, said in a telephone interview.

Still shaken, she described a dramatic scene as neighbors rushed to the wreckage.

She said the plane struck a tree before it crashed, probably keeping it from hitting nearby houses.

“It was like a fireball as soon as it hit the ground,” she said.

Children were playing on the streets nearby, and the neighborhood was busy with activity, making it all the more amazing no one on the ground was hurt, she said.

An official from the National Transportation Safety Board said investigators were on their way to the scene and could not comment on any possible cause.

The plane was a Socata TB10, a light single-engine propeller plane with four seats. It is registered to a man from Orlando, Fla., according to the F.A.A.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

Source: NY Times