5 killed in plane crash in parking lot of Santa Ana shopping center

SANTA ANA – A pilot and four passengers were killed Sunday afternoon when a twin-engine aircraft, which had declared an emergency, crashed into a busy parking lot across from South Coast Plaza, striking a car whose driver was apparently inside shopping.

The Cessna 414 was on approach to John Wayne Airport, said Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Steve Concialdi. There were no survivors.

The plane went down at 12:28 p.m. in the parking lot of a Staples Supercenter, at 3861 S. Bristol St. in Santa Ana, near Sunflower Avenue. The parking lot is shared by a CVS drug store, a Michaels art-supply store, a Wells Fargo Bank branch and other stores. A gas station is adjacent to the lot.

The crash site is diagonally across the intersection from popular South Coast Plaza.

The crash site is one mile northwest of the northern end of a runway at John Wayne Airport. The flight was heading for Atlantic Aviation, one of the airport’s fixed-base operators, said airport spokeswoman Deanne Thompson. Fixed-base operators provide services such as refueling and hangar space for aircraft, and also can rent planes for flights.

A spokesman for Atlantic Aviation said it had received a request to house the plane, and that Atlantic Aviation had no previous contact with the owner of the plane that crashed Sunday.

“Atlantic Aviation (and) the entire aviation community are deeply saddened by today’s event,” the spokesman said.

Arlene Salac, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the plane had reported an emergency but she would not elaborate.

“The FAA will investigate, and the NTSB will determine the cause of the accident,” she said.

The plane was registered to a San Francisco company, Category III Aviation Corp., and had flown from the East Bay suburb of Concord, according to FAA records.

Jesse Perez of Santa Ana was eating lunch with a friend at Buffalo Wild Wings, which shares the parking lot, when he heard a loud crash.

“It sounded like a truck hit the building,” he said.

Customers ran from the restaurant into the lot and saw the wreckage of the white Cessna with green and blue trim.

“Bodies were hanging from out the side of the plane,” said Perez, adding that emergency workers were there within minutes. “I couldn’t believe what was happening.”

While the crash was a tragedy, OCFA Capt. Tony Bommarito said, “The fact that there was no injuries on the ground is a miracle in itself.”

Hiro Yamanouchi was walking out of a sushi restaurant when he saw  the Cessna low over the shopping center – about the height that a person could throw a baseball.

As the plane crossed Bristol, he said, it made a hard turn to the left, then flew downward back toward the CVS parking lot. It dove straight into a red Chevy sedan parked in front of the CVS.  Yamanouchi said the force of the crash made the car bounce once into the air. He saw shrapnel flying.

“It went in slow motion,” he said. “I saw pieces flying. Immediately when I saw that, I tried to run toward the crash. But then I thought, ‘This thing might explode.’

“I was shaking.”

Alex Perkins, 50, was walking into Staples when he spotted the small plane low overhead.

“It dropped, it just dropped,” Perkins said. “I thought, ‘Wow! That plane is low. He’s gonna crash.’”

Perkins said as he watched the plane start to lose control, he heard a loud sputter, as if something was wrong with one of the aircraft’s engine.

As the plane dived into the parking lot, he saw a large piece of debris fly into the air and land in the back of a woman’s pickup truck. He and another man rushed to check on the woman, with all three running away out of fear the plane might suddenly catch fire.

There was no smell of gas, no fire – so Perkins, a former paramedic, ran up to where he saw the bodies of two men in the wreckage.

“I went straight into rescue mode,” he said.

He checked their pulses.

But they had died.

Perkins said he looked inside the craft, and saw a young man sitting behind the pilot seat, and two other people in the seats behind him. All appeared to be dead.

According to FAA records, the 1973 Cessna was a multi-engine aircraft certified through October 2019.

For hours after the crash, several dozen cars remained behind police tape as transportation and fire officials conducted their investigations. Shopping areas on three sides of the parking lot where the plane crashed remained busy Sunday afternoon, with shoppers and nearby residents gathering just outside the tape to get a look at the destroyed plane.

The body of the plane was in front of the Staples, resting partly on a median with small plants. The nose appeared crumpled. The rear door on the driver’s side of the Chevy that was struck, and its trunk, were ripped away.

Bommarito, the fire captain, said it appeared the crash was abrupt, containing the impact to a small area.

“The potential for something far worse was there,” Bommarito said. “We can only speculate what was going through the pilot’s mind, if this was his plan to try to get it to a place were he saw there was no people.”

The pilot and passenger’s identities were not released by officials on Sunday.

In recent years, there have been other accidents near John Wayne Airport.

In January, a 24-year-old pilot made a split-second decision to fly beneath an overpass before finishing a safe, emergency landing on the 55 freeway.

That same month, a helicopter on its way to Catalina Island, shortly after take-off from John Wayne, slammed up against a Newport beach home, killing three aboard and injuring two others. The NTSB has not made public yet the cause of the crash.

On June 30, 2017, a twin-engine plane crash-landed on the I-405 freeway in Irvine during the tail-end of morning rush-hour, banging into the center divider, colliding with a car, scattering debris that at least three other vehicles couldn’t avoid and ultimately erupting in flames. The 55-year-old female passenger staggered out of the six-seat plane. The 62-year-old male pilot was pulled from the cockpit by an off-duty firefighter. Both had traumatic injuries but survived.

Staff writer Tony Saavedra contributed to this report.