EL CAJON, Calif. — A small aircraft crashed in an El Cajon neighborhood Sunday night just after 6 p.m., Heartland Fire confirmed.
The crash happened near Lily Avenue and Clarke Drive. The plane came down on the street. It hit power lines, but avoided hitting any homes or vehicles.
According to flightaware.com, the plane took off from Gillespie Field at 5:52 p.m. It crashed at 6:17 p.m. CBS 8 obtained audio from liveatc.net between the pilot and air traffic controllers, where he told them he's run into engine trouble, he's lost oil pressure.
The fixed-wing single engine plane is registered to a man out of Santee, but it's unclear if he was the one flying the plane when it went down right in front of neighbor Michelle Hilliard's house. She said she heard a loud bang.
"It's a plane in my front yard! Honestly that's all you thinking," she said. "We hear them all the time circling. You hear them go 'sput sput sput' as its getting ready to land. We're always like 'It's not gonna crash, it's not gonna crash.' This time it did."
Her husband and other neighbors ran to help the pilot. She said he was alert and talking. He walked across the street and sat down on the curb. Emergency crews arrived quickly.
"We are so lucky," said Hilliard. "We have this power pole right here, if he had gone another two feet that could've [been] hit and gone into our house. "There's so many things that could've happened. We're so grateful for the pilot's skills that he was able to land in this street without doing any major damage to anybody or anything."
The plane was towed from the scene around 9:45 a.m. Monday.
Immediately after the crash, SDG&E Outage Map was reporting more than 1,400 SDGE customers without power.
As of 9:30 p.m. Sunday, power had been restored to all but 166 customers.
The pilot was injured and transported to Sharp Memorial, officials say.
Based on the plane's tail number, FlightAware shows the plane took off from Gillespie Field at 5:52 p.m. The tracker shows the path of the plane heading east before turning around and heading back west toward Gilespie Field before crashing in the El Cajon neighborhood.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board will conduct an investigation into the cause of the crash.
The FAA shared the following statement on the crash:
"A single-engine Bellanca Viking crashed in a residential neighborhood in El Cajon, California around 6:15 p.m. local time on Sunday, April 28. Only the pilot was on board. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will investigate. The NTSB will be in charge of the investigation and will provide any updates."