A single-engine plane crashed into a waterfront mobile home park in Clearwater, Fla., on Thursday evening after the pilot reported an engine failure, killing several people, damaging four homes and setting the area on fire, officials said.
The plane slammed directly into one home, causing “several fatalities, both from the aircraft and within the mobile home,” Scott Ehlers, the fire chief of Clearwater, said at a news conference.
The crash left part of the mobile home park, Bayside Waters, engulfed in flames. Three other homes were damaged, though no one inside those was injured, Chief Ehlers said.
The aircraft, which crashed at around 7 p.m., was a Beechcraft Bonanza V35, and the number of people on board was unknown as of early Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.
Eyewitnesses described seeing large flames and a lot of smoke. “We heard a racing engine,” said Janet Barclay, “then an explosion.”
Laketa Collins, a delivery driver, said that she had seen a ball of bright, white light falling in the dark sky from her car window about half a mile away.
The Fire Department received the initial call just after 7 p.m., and crews “quickly extinguished” the blaze after arriving at the park within roughly seven minutes, Chief Ehlers said.
At about the same time that his department was called, the chief said, the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, roughly three miles away, had dispatched its own fire response vehicles to an “aircraft having an emergency.”
The pilot had reported a “mayday” over the radio to the airport, he added.
“The aircraft went off radar about three miles north of the runway, which is in this location here,” the chief said at the crash site.
The National Transportation Safety Board will be in charge of the investigation, the F.A.A. said.
