HOUSTON – Three Oklahomans are dead after a their plane crashed near Hobby Airport Thursday afternoon.
NBC affiliate in Houston, KAGS, is reporting that the Cirrus single-engine SR-20 crashed in the parking lot of an Ace Hardware Store.
Records in the FAA registry show the plane is registered to Safe Aviation LLC in Moore, Oklahoma. Officials with Safe Aviation could not immediately be reached for comment.
According to Oklahoma City's KFOR, the victims were Oklahomans: Dana Gray, her husband, Tony Gray, and his brother, Jerry Gray.
No one was in the parked car that was hit by the plane, he said.
"It didn't strike the building. No fire. No fuel spill," Lozano said.
Evans said no other injuries were reported.
A recording from Air Traffic Control can be heard saying “straighten up, straighten up,” to the pilot just before the crash, says KAGS.
Witnesses said the plane appeared to have fallen from the sky and dropped to the ground.
"There was a great big loud noise, like a bomb and a real screechy noise. When I looked out I saw the plane in the parking lot," Susan Conklin, who was in her resale shop across the street from the hardware store when the crash occurred, said in a phone interview.
Conklin said that after the crash, she didn't see any movement from inside the plane and people didn't immediately rush to the plane over concern it might explode.
"It was scary," she said.
Television news footage showed the plane narrowly missed hitting a couple of propane tanks in the parking lot.
It was not immediately known what caused the plane to crash. Lunsford said the National Transportation Safety Board will be in charge of the crash investigation.
According to the flight-tracking website FlightAware, the plane had departed from near Norman, Oklahoma, at 10:11 a.m. CDT. The website also showed that in the last 15 minutes of its flight, the plane's altitude greatly fluctuated, going from 1,800 feet down to 200 feet and back up to 1,200 feet before crashing, as per AP.
