Disturbing new video recorded blocks away from where a plane crashed near El Cajon Monday night shows the final seconds of the airplane's descent and its awful aftermath.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the Learjet 35A crashed at 7:14 p.m. in the Bostonia area of unincorporated El Cajon as it was approaching Gillespie Field, which is one of the busiest small aircraft airports in the San Diego area, handling between 600-800 flights per day.
The grainy black-and-white video recorded by a NEST doorbell camera shows the aircraft, which had just been granted permission for a visual approach to a runway at Gillespie, making a sharp descent, then vanishing from view behind the horizon. Then, for a horrible few moments during the 18-second video, a fireball lights up the night sky.
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All four people on board were killed in the crash, two crew and two passengers, according to the FAA. Their identities have not yet been made public.
The plane came down on the roadway of Pepper Drive near North Mollison, a couple of miles east of Gillespie Field. Miraculously, nobody on the ground in the residential neighborhood was hurt.
Briget Spain, who lives across the street from the crash scene, told NBC 7 about the terrifying incident.
"My daughter looked out the window and said, 'Mom! A plane just crashed!'," Spain recalled. "And I ran over there … as soon as I opened the door, a ball of fire just … something exploded and, you know, shook the house, knocked us back."
Local
The plane came down 1.4 miles from the beginning of the runway, according to the NTSB, which said three of its investigators had been assigned to investigate the incident.
After a crash in Santee in October that killed a pilot and a UPS driver on the ground, NBC 7 Investigates scoured through more than 120 NTSB investigation reports and dug up at least 35 plane or helicopter crashes into San Diego County neighborhoods since 2010. In those crashes, 30 people died and 20 others were seriously injured.
The airport connected to the lion’s share of those crashes is Gillespie Field in El Cajon — there have been at least 16 crashes in surrounding neighborhoods.
The plane that crashed on Monday had departed earlier that night from John Wayne Airport in Orange County.
