A small plane crashed into the roof of a California factory building on Thursday, Jan. 2, and burst, killing two people and wounding 18 others, according to officials.
The four-seat, single-engine aircraft nosedived into the furniture manufacturing building — where at least 200 people were inside working at the time — less than two minutes after it took off from Fullerton Municipal Airport in Orange County, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website.
Officers and firefighters rushed to the scene of the crash around 2 p.m. and battled the large blaze while evacuating the building, home to furniture manufacturer Michael Nicholas Designs, and surrounding businesses, officials said.
Two people were pronounced de@d at the scene, 10 people were rushed to area hospitals and eight were treated at the scene and released, the Fullerton Police Department said. It wasn’t immediately clear if the two fat@lities were people on the plane or on the ground.
Surveillance footage from a nearby building shows the harrowing moment the plane crashed at high speed into the roof of the factory, setting off a huge plume of flames and black smoke.
Officials are investigating what caused the wreck.
Airport operations worker Chris Villalobos said the pilot of the plane told air traffic control he was going to turn around to make an emergency landing before the crash. He didn’t say what the issue prompting the emergency landing was.
The pilot was a regular at the one-runway airport about six miles from Disneyland and even had a hangar there, Villalobos said. He frequently took off from the small airport.
The plane was a single-engine Van’s RV-10, which has four seats, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Madukwe B. Nwabuisi is an accomplished journalist renown for his fearless reporting style and extensive expertise in the field. He is an investigative journalist, who has established himself as a kamikaze reporter.
