Virginia Plane Crash Kills 10 Parachutists Aircraft Slams Into House, Killing Man But Sparing His Son’s Life

A plane carrying 11 members of a skydiving school crashed into a house and exploded Sunday, killing a man sitting on his back porch and everyone aboard the aircraft.

The house caught fire, but authorities said no one else living in the row of about 10 houses along a woodsy lane in the rural Tidewater area of Virginia was injured.

Mattie Byrd was lying in bed when she heard the plane laboring overhead: “I … saw the plane in the air, and it turned like it wanted to go back the other way; then it made a nose dive.

“I was assuming it was coming in the back door of my house. It sounded like it was going through something, and then it went boom. By the time we got outside, it had blown and there was fire everywhere.”

Byrd said her neighbor, Vincent Harris, who owned a trucking company and moonlighted as a Baptist minister, was killed, but his son, Vincent Jr., 8, was playing outside and wasn’t injured. His wife and daughter were not at home.

“Right after the crash, a couple of people tried to get in there to get him, but they couldn’t. It was all in flames,” she said.

The fire melted the vinyl siding on her house, about 50 feet from the Harris home.

The plane, a Beechcraft Queen Air BE-65, went down about 6:45 p.m. just east of Shacklefords, about 40 miles east of Richmond. It crashed about 15 minutes after taking off from West Point Municipal Airport, said Arlene Salac, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

The pilot and parachutists were from a sky-diving school based at the airport, which is about 1-1/2 miles from the crash site.

The seats in the twin-engine plane had been removed so it could carry as many as 12 people for sky diving, Salac said.

The plane was owned by Peninsula Skydiving, she said.

There was no immediate indication what had caused the crash. FAA and National Transportation Safety Board agents are investigating.