A single-engine plane crashed over a busy street near Seattle Tuesday afternoon, causing damage to several vehicles and power lines but no serious injuries to the passengers, officials said.
The Piper PA32 was taking off from Paine Field in Mukilteo, a city 25 miles north of Seattle, when it began to lose engine power and crashed, Fox News reported.
Investigators said the pilot and the passenger inside the plane walked away from the crash despite the damage it caused.
KOMO reported that out of the two passengers inside the plane and those inside the cars damaged by the plane, only two people suffered minor injuries, with only one needing hospitalization.
The pilot told investigators that he was losing too much altitude as a result of the engine failure to go back to the airport he departed from, so he decided to attempt a landing on the nearest clear area, Harbour Point Boulevard, KCPQ reported.
A driver whose vehicle was damaged by the plane’s wing said she was lucky to escape without a scratch when the plane went down on Mukilteo Speedway and Harbour Pointe Boulevard.
“I just said, ‘Get down!’ And before I know it, I could feel the heat on my face … and like the fireball and the wing clipped at the end,” Amanda Hayes told KOMO News. “When it was over, I wasn’t sure if we were OK, if our van was OK. I don’t know, that’s probably the closest I’ve come to really thinking, ‘Oh, this is the end.'”
“I heard an explosion, a big ‘boom!’ like this, and you saw the smoke blow up and then, ‘whoosh’ he hit the cars and then he went to the side of the road,” Elaine Warbus, another witness to the crash, said.
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