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| Two Cessna Planes Collide in California Skies |
California - Two small Cessna planes collided in Northern California, United States while trying to land at a local airport. At least two of the three passengers died as a result of the incident. According to a tweet from the city of Watsonville, the planes crashed at the city's airport shortly before 3pm local time.
The city-owned airport does not have a control tower to direct aircraft during landing and take-off. According to the US civil aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), there were two people on board the twin-engine Cessna 340 and only one pilot on board the single-engine Cessna 152 in the crash.
Officials said multiple fatalities were reported but it was not immediately clear if there were any survivors. "The pilots were on their last approach to the airport prior to the collision," the FAA said in a statement.
The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board, who did not immediately have additional details, were investigating the crash. No one on the mainland was injured. Photos and videos posted on social media showed the wreckage of a small plane on a grassy field near the airport.
One image shows plumes of smoke seen from a road near the airport. A photo from the town of Watsonville shows damage to a small building at the airport, with firefighters at the scene. "The planes were about 61 meters in the air when they crashed," a witness told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Franky Herrera was driving through the airport when he saw the twin-engine plane tilt to the right and hit the wing of the smaller plane, which just turned and crashed near the edge of the airfield and not far from home, he told the newspaper.