Two small planes collided mid-air near Lancaster, California — just outside of Los Angeles — on Sunday, killing one of the plane's pilot. Both planes were flown by a solo pilot and, fortunately, had nobody else on board.
One of the single-engine planes crash-landed just yards away from a woman and her granddaughter, who were surprised by the sound of the crash as they sat in a parked car.
"All of a sudden we heard this poof! and I looked over there, 'cause I thought it was a motorcycle racing in the dirt, and I saw and said, 'OMG! It's an airplane!'" said the grandmother, Tammy Peterson, via NBC News.
Witnesses said the pilot who survived the unusual crash was able to walk away from the accident, but seemed distressed. "He said he was alright," one witness told KTLA. "But he said it was terrible."
From The Independent:
An NBC Los Angeles image from the scene of the crash shows what appears to be a vintage military aircraft with a red star on its tail.
"A single-engine Nanchang CJ-6 and single-engine Yakovlev Yak-52 collided in mid-air near Lancaster, California, around 1 p.m. local time on Sunday, Sept. 22," the Federal Aviation Administration wrote in a statement. "Only the pilots were on board the aircraft. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will investigate."
Both aircraft are vintage planes that were used for training by the Chinese and Russian militaries, respectively.
According to a "mid-air collision" article in Wikipedia, this type of plane crash is extremely rare (relative to the number of flights per day), with an average of less than one per year worldwide. It will be interesting to see what investigators find out about this crash in the coming days.
Previously: Small plane flips into "headstand" as pilot crash lands it on a Long Island beach (video)
