By Frank Kamuntu
As many as nine people were inside a mobile home in Clearwater, Fla., just before a single-engine plane crashed directly into it on Thursday evening, killing the pilot and two people inside, the authorities said.
The Clearwater Police Department said that all but two people who had been at the home had left just before the plane slammed into it at around 7 p.m.
Ted Atwood was among those who left just before the crash.
The group had gone to the house to socialize after a day of golf and dinner at a restaurant, Mr. Atwood said. He said he and three others left just 10 minutes before the plane struck, and five others left just five minutes before the crash.
He said it was “pure luck” that he was not there when the plane, a Beechcraft Bonanza V35, smashed into the home. “I’m going to buy a lottery ticket today and thank God that we left just in time,” he said on Friday.
The pilot had reported an engine failure just before the plane hit the home, Scott Ehlers, the Clearwater fire chief, said at a news conference. The authorities did not immediately release the names of the pilot or the two people in the home who were killed.
“Our thoughts are with the three victims and their families,” Clearwater’s police chief, Eric Gandy, said in a statement on Friday. “This tragedy could have been even worse.”
The crash left part of a mobile home park named Bayside Waters engulfed in flames. Three other homes were damaged, though no one inside those was injured, Chief Ehlers said.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it was investigating the crash. The agency said that an investigator had arrived at the mobile home park on Friday morning to document the scene and examine the aircraft.
The plane left Vero Beach, Fla., at 6:08 p.m., and was headed to Clearwater, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking site. It was registered to a software company with offices in Indiana and Florida.
Laketa Collins, who saw the explosion from her car window about half a mile away, described a ball of bright, white light falling in the dark sky.
Carolee Kingsbury said she was taking part in a regular Thursday evening bingo game at the Bayside Waters clubhouse until somebody said, “There’s a fire in the park,” and people she was playing with got up to see what had happened.
When Ms. Kingsbury followed them outside, she saw police cars and fire trucks converging on the park. Then she heard that a plane had crashed into a home.
“That was a little bit hard to believe,” Ms. Kingsbury said on Friday. “It was shocking.”
Judy Bossie said she was also at the clubhouse for bingo when she heard there was a fire on her street. She ran to check on her home and her dog and saw that “fire was shooting high.”
“It was really big,” Ms. Bossie said. “We’re not used to that in this little community.”
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.
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