PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. — A few hundred yards. That’s all the struggling six-seater airplane needed to get safely back to the airport.
Instead, like a bolt from the sky, it crashed down onto a city street and into an SUV that had been carrying a woman and her young son past the North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines on Monday.
Miraculously, the pair survived the crash, although they remain hospitalized. The two people in the plane died when the wreckage burst into flames, spreading a ribbon of fire across the pavement.
“It was like a bomb going off,” said Anabel Fernandez, whose Ring doorbell video captured the horrific crash that shook her nearby home on Southwest 13th Street.
The video shows the SUV heading north on Southwest 72nd Avenue. The plane drops into the frame and collides with the SUV. A huge cloud of dust and smoke blocks the road. A split second later, a fireball explodes near the fence surrounding the airport.
The Beechcraft Bonanza plane had just taken off from the airport and was returning about 3 p.m., said Pembroke Pines Fire Chief Marcel Rodriguez.
The small plane may have had a mechanical problem before clipping a power line, Rodriguez said. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.
The names and ages of those in the crash were not released Monday night. Both the people in the SUV were taken to Memorial Regional Hospital. The boy was in critical condition and the woman was in serious condition on Monday night, authorities said.
The driver was able to pull herself from the wreckage, while frantically trying to rescue the boy trapped in the SUV.
Fernandez said she has lived with fear that something like this would happen.
“I’m always afraid being here, my family and I see the planes flying very low while we’re walking the neighborhood or sometimes when we’re out back in the pool,” Fernandez said.
Salah Elshaer had just left his house and was driving west on Southwest 13th Street when he heard the crash. The noise was jarring, the 17-year-old said.
“It was just flames,” he said.
He called 911. While he was on the phone with dispatchers and recording video on his phone, he heard another explosion from the airplane.
“I just felt bad thinking about the pilot’s family, and the people over in the car who were hurt,” he said. “It’s sad because this is not the first time this has happened here in this residential area.”
This is at least the fifth major incident at the airport since May.
In December, a plane erupted in flames when it crashed at the airport; all four on board survived. Earlier that month a plane landed upside down during a crash. A month before that, a pilot was killed when he crashed at the airport. Another pilot, this one a student, was killed in May.
There are several flight schools at the North Perry Airport. It was not clear Monday whether the pilot was a student.
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