vA business jet crashed into a San Diego neighborhood during foggy weather early Thursday, setting about 15 homes fire and evacuating homes along several blocks, authorities said.
“We have jet fuel all over the place,” Assistant Fire Department Chief Dan Eddy said during a news conference. “Our main goal is to search all these homes and get everybody out right now.”
He said “there is a direct hit to multiple homes” in the Murphy Canyon neighborhood.
It was not known if there were any injuries.
A spokesman for San Diego Fire told CNN that a Cessna 550 airplane, often called a Citation, “crashed near Montgomery Executive Airport around 3:45 am” Thursday.
The private jet is commonly used for business travel and can carry six to eight people. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash. “The number of people on board is unknown at this time,” the FAA said in a statement.
Eddy said it was very foggy at the time the private plane crashed. “You could barely see in front of you,” he said.
According to the flight tracking site FlightAware, the Citation took off from Teterboro Airport, just outside of New York City, late Wednesday night.
The plane stopped in Wichita, Kansas for about an hour before flying on to San Diego.
The pilot announced on the radio the plane was three miles away from a planned landing on runway 28 at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport, according to a recording from the website LiveATC.net.
There was no sign of any problem, and no emergency was declared.
The airport has a control tower, but it is not staffed in the overnight hours so pilots announce their intentions to any other pilots listening on the “common traffic advisory frequency.”
The Citation, according to FAA records, is owned by a company in Alaska and was built in 1985.
By CNN
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