A small twin-engine plane crashed on a freeway near Southern California airport on Friday morning, injuring the two people on board. The plane clipped on a passing vehicle.
A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said: the Cessna 310 aircraft crashed on Interstate 405, just short of a runway at John Wayne Airport in Costa Mesa at around 09:30 AM.
The spokesperson said that the pilot declared an emergency after taking off from the airport and was trying to return.
"Hey, we got a mayday!" the pilot told air traffic controllers before the crash. "Mayday, mayday ... I'm trying to make it back to the airport."
The exchange was captured on a recording of air traffic controller communications, posted on the website LiveATC.net.
After an air traffic controller tells the pilot a gear of the plane appears to be up, the pilot says he's trying to gain altitude. "I lost my right engine," he said.
The two people who were on board, a man and woman, were alive when they were pulled from the engulfed wreckage and were immediately taken to a hospital.
The driver of the truck, the plane clipped, sustained only minor injuries.
"The fact that a plane was able to land and only strike a single vehicle is extraordinary," he said.
Video footages on social media showed the plane engulfed in flames. Traffic was backed up for miles on the major route between Los Angeles and San Diego as firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze.
"The plane collided, spun across the freeway and burst into flames," Kurtz said. The wreckage saw strewn across several lanes of the freeway, he said.
Tina Foster who left just left the airport heard a loud boom, which she initially thought was a car crash. "By the time I got up to it, the only thing I saw was the flames," she said.
She clicked a photo of smoke pouring out from behind the airport on Facebook to claim her friends' fears after receiving texts asking if she were still alive.
Another driver, Brian Gladish, said he was driving down the freeway when he saw a large cloud of smoke and flames. "There was debris everywhere, the freeway was still on fire," he said.
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