All five people aboard a small charter plane were killed Tuesday when it crashed into a shopping centre near Essendon Airport in the Australian city of Melbourne, officials said.
“There were five on the aircraft and it looks like no-one has survived the crash,” said police commissioner Stephen Leane, adding the flight appeared to have had a “catastrophic engine failure.”
“At this stage the advice we have is there are no fatalities other than on the aircraft itself,” he told reporters in Melbourne.
“Looking at the fireball, it is incredibly lucky that no-one was at the back of those stores or in the car park of the stores, that no
one was even hurt.”
The premier of the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, Daniel Andrews, said the crash was “the worst civil aviation
accident that our state has seen for 30 years”.
The Beechcraft twin-engine aircraft crashed soon after taking off from the airport, located approximately 13 kilometres north-west of central Melbourne, which is used primarily for smaller aircraft.
The plane crashed into the Direct Factory Outlet shopping centre which was not open to the public at the time. There were staff members in some of the shops, but none were injured.
Police superintendent Mick Frewen said there was a mayday call from the plane shortly after it took off.
Michael Howard, a 29-year-old plumber, told local broadcaster ABC radio that he saw a blue flash, which “erupted into a huge fireball.”
“[I thought] what the hell? That doesn’t happen every day. It was crazy, like something from a movie.”
Another witness, Jason, told local ABC radio: “I saw this plane coming in really low and fast. It went just behind the barriers so I couldn’t see the impact but when it hit the building there was a massive fireball.”
“I could feel the heat through the window of the taxi, and then a wheel, it looked like a plane wheel, bounced on the road and hit the front of the taxi as we were driving along.”
“There was a big crash and then a big red fireball, like a mushroom,” another witness, Carmel Brown, told the Australian Associated Press.
According to local media, the fatalities included four US tourists and an Australian pilot, but the US embassy in Canberra and Australian officials would not confirm the nationalities of the deceased.
Firefighters fought for hours to extinguish the aviation fuel blaze that destroyed the aircraft, as well as parts of the building and a
nearby car park.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it was investigating the accident and has deployed a team of four investigators to the site.
