A vintage single-engine plane slammed into a residential home in Akron, Ohio, on Thursday afternoon, killing both people aboard while the family inside the home managed to escape before the structure caught fire, authorities said.
The crash occurred on the 2000 block of Canterbury Circle, according to the Akron Fire Department. The department urged residents to avoid the area as crews worked the scene. The Federal Aviation
stated the crash occurred around 3:45 p.m. local time and confirmed that it is investigating, with the National Transportation Safety Board taking the lead.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol identified the plane as a 1963 Piper Cherokee that had left from Akron Fulton Airport, east of the crash site. The plane went down west of Interstate 77, and the crash triggered a structure fire, the patrol said in a statement to media outlets.
Both the pilot and passenger of the plane died, state troopers said. No bystanders on the ground were reported hurt. All residents of the home were able to get out safely before the fire spread.
A neighbor, Christi Gould, said she spoke with the family shortly after the crash and learned how close the situation had come to catastrophe. She said the father had managed to get everyone out of the house—including two young children who had been napping upstairs at the time.
Gould, who was home with her own children when the plane came down, described the moments before the crash.
"We were sitting there, the power flickered for a few seconds, and then I heard the whining of a plane," she told
News 5 Cleveland . "We have the regional airport up the street, and so you can hear these planes all the time, and you just heard a real quick whining of it like it was revving and then all of a sudden, 'boom,' explosion. And our house shook, and it scared the crap out of us. And everybody started running outside to see what happened and where it was."
The Akron crash comes less than two weeks after a deadly plane crash in Texas, where five members of a Texas pickleball club were killed while traveling to a tournament in the Hill Country.
In that accident, a private Cessna 421C went down late on a Thursday evening in a wooded area near Wimberley, outside Austin, after leaving River Falls Airport in Amarillo en route to New Braunfels National Airport. The Amarillo Pickleball Club said in a Facebook
post that five of its members, including the pilot, died in the crash. Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra confirmed all five fatalities in a statement and said preliminary findings indicated the plane was traveling at a high speed at impact. He also noted there was “no indication of a mid-air collision” and that a second plane flying nearby landed safely in New Braunfels.
