SAN DIEGO (SONNA) \u2014 The runway lights were out, a weather alert system wasn\u2019t working and there was heavy fog at a San Diego airport when a pilot who had flown across the country made the decision to proceed with landing but came up short and crashed into a neighborhood, likely killing all six aboard the aircraft, investigators said Friday.<\/p>\n
Investigator Dan Baker of the National Transportation Safety Board said officials will work over the next year to determine what caused the Cessna 550 Citation to crash just before 4 a.m. Thursday. The jet was carrying a music executive and five others. No one in the neighborhood of U.S. Navy housing died, but eight people were treated for smoke inhalation from the fiery crash and non-life-threatening injuries.<\/p>\n
The pilot acknowledged the weather conditions for landing at the small airport were not ideal and debated diverting to a different airport while discussing the visibility with an air traffic controller at a regional Federal Aviation Administration control tower, according to audio of the conversation posted by\u00a0LiveATC.net<\/span>.<\/p>\n The FAA had posted an official notice for pilots that the lights were out of service, but it\u2019s not known whether the pilot had checked it. He didn\u2019t discuss the lights being out with air traffic control, but was aware that the airport\u2019s weather alert system was inoperable. Ultimately, the pilot is heard saying that he\u2019ll stick with the plan to land at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport.<\/p>\n \u201cDoesn\u2019t sound great but we\u2019ll give it a go,\u201d he told the air traffic controller.<\/p>\n The plane crashed about 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) from the airport.<\/p>\n Baker said a power surge knocked out the weather system at the airport but the pilot was aware of the fog and an air traffic controller gave him weather information from Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, about 4 miles (6.44 kilometers) north.<\/p>\n SAN DIEGO (SONNA) \u2014 The runway lights were out, a weather alert system wasn\u2019t working and there was heavy fog at a San Diego airport when a pilot who had flown across the country made the decision to proceed with landing but came up short and crashed into a neighborhood, likely killing all six aboard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":441941,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-441940","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":441942,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441940\/revisions\/441942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}