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Planes collide while trying to land at California, 3 dead

Saturday, August 20, 2022

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Three people were killed after two small planes collided in Northern California while trying to land at a rural airport, authorities said Friday.

The names of those killed after their planes crashed Thursday at the Watsonville Municipal Airport will be released once their families have been notified, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.


There were two people aboard a twin-engine Cessna 340 and only the pilot aboard a single-engine Cessna 152 during the crash, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The city-owned airport does not have a control tower to direct aircraft landing and taking off. The airport accounts for about 40% of all general aviation activities in the Monterey Bay area, according to the City of Watsonville’s website.

Watsonville, an agricultural town near Monterey Bay, is about 100 miles south of San Francisco.

The sheriff’s office said the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board were investigating.

Photos and videos from the scene posted on social media showed the wreckage of one small plane in a grassy field by the airport. One picture showed a plume of smoke visible from a street near the airport.

The planes were about 200 feet in the air when they crashed, a witness told the SaSanta Cruz Sentinel.

Franky Herrera was driving past the airport when he saw the twin-engine plane bank hard to the right and hit the wing of the smaller aircraft, which just spiraled down and crashed near the edge of the airfield and not far from homes, he told the newspaper.

Other pilots also were hurt in aircraft crashes elsewhere in California on Thursday.

A 65-year-old San Diego man received major but non-life threatening injuries when his single-engine plane crashed on a street near a busy freeway overpass in El Cajon, authorities said.

The plane reportedly struck an SUV but nobody on the ground was hurt in the city northeast of downtown San Diego.

Later, the pilot of an ultralight aircraft was critically injured when it crashed upside down on a building at the Camarillo Airport in Ventura County, about 60 miles from downtown Los Angeles.




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