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Small plane crashes into Florida mobile home park, killing 3

An aerial drone view Friday morning of the scene where a small plane crashed into the Bayside Waters mobile home park in Clearwater, Fla. (Dirk Shadd)
By Ellen Francis and Ian Duncan Washington Post

A small plane crashed and burned at a mobile home park in Florida, starting a fire and killing the pilot and two people on the ground Thursday night, officials said.

The blaze engulfed part of the mobile home park, Bayside Waters, in Clearwater. The Federal Aviation Administration said early Friday the pilot reported an engine failure and the aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza V35, went down.

The plane was flying from Vero Beach on Florida’s east coast to Clearwater Airpark, according to data from FlightRadar24.

The pilot reported to air traffic controllers that he was losing engine power shortly before the crash. The pilot of another small plane broadcast that he saw what happened, according to audio archived by LiveATC.net.

“They went down hard,” the pilot of the second plane said. “They’re in flames.”

The pilot of the second plane circled around the crash site to get a better look, telling air traffic controllers he had seen the crashed plane “going down at an extremely high rate of speed” and that it appeared to have demolished a house. The pilot declined to comment when reached by phone Friday.

The single-engine plane crashed into a home, causing fatalities “both from the aircraft and within the mobile home,” Clearwater Fire Chief Scott Ehlers told reporters earlier.

He said the crash appeared to cause damage to three other homes but did not injure people inside them. Video posted online showed flames and a thick plume of smoke rising from near homes in the area.

The Clearwater Fire Department received a call at 7:08 p.m., and firefighters who arrived in the area seven minutes later extinguished the flames, Ehlers said.

The St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport also dispatched response vehicles around the same time to an “aircraft having an emergency,” after the pilot reported a “mayday” over the radio, the fire chief said. “The aircraft went off radar about three miles north of the runway, which is in this location here,” he told reporters.

The crashed plane is registered to a company in Indianapolis, according to FAA records. The company could not immediately be reached Friday.

The Clearwater police chief said the investigation into the incident would involve federal authorities.