Two children killed as small plane crashes near historic Fresno airpark

Two children were killed and two adults were left in critical condition Saturday afternoon when a small plane crashed and caught fire on a bluff above the San Joaquin River in northwest Fresno, California, prompting an investigation into what brought the aircraft down just past the runway at one of the country's oldest residential airparks.

The crash was reported shortly before 2 p.m. in the 7300 block of North Blythe Avenue, near Sierra Sky Park Airport, according to the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. Four people were aboard the fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft, identified by multiple local outlets as a Grumman American Aviation Corp. AA-5, when it went down roughly 200 yards beyond the end of the runway and burst into flames.

The response

Sheriff's deputies, Fresno firefighters and Fresno police officers reached the scene within minutes, and North Central Fire Protection District led the effort to knock down the flames before they could spread to nearby homes, according to local reporting on the response. About 20 law enforcement vehicles and 10 fire engines converged on the site. The two adult survivors were taken to Community Regional Medical Center in critical condition; the two children who died were pronounced dead at the scene. Their identities and relationship to each other and to the surviving pair had not been released as of early Sunday.

Fresno City Manager Georgeanne White helped coordinate the multi-agency response, and Pacific Gas & Electric crews were called in after the crash briefly knocked out power to homes in the area. Fresno City Councilmember Mike Karbassi, whose district includes the crash site, posted a statement calling the episode a shock to the surrounding neighborhood.

"This is a rare and tragic situation in northwest Fresno. My immediate concern is for the survivors of this heart wrenching situation," Karbassi wrote, adding that his office would work to make sure the survivors "have what they need as they recover."

A historic airpark

Sierra Sky Park, roughly seven miles northwest of downtown Fresno, is widely credited as the first residential airpark built anywhere in the world, established in 1946 by aviators returning from World War II who wanted to keep their planes at home. Homeowners there taxi from wide neighborhood streets directly onto a single asphalt runway just under 3,000 feet long, and the layout has since been copied by hundreds of similar communities across the country. Federal Aviation Administration accident and incident data shows Sierra Sky Park as a privately owned, public-use field with no control tower, meaning pilots coordinate their own approaches and departures over a shared radio frequency rather than through air traffic controllers.

Who is affected

Sierra Sky Park remains an active flying community, with dozens of homes built around a shared taxiway system and residents who keep single-engine aircraft parked in attached hangars rather than garages. The airpark's roughly three dozen based aircraft and the steady stream of general-aviation traffic in and out of its short runway mean any accident there reverberates quickly through a tightly knit neighborhood where many residents are themselves pilots. Saturday's crash unfolded in view of homes along the bluff, and several nearby residences lost power briefly as utility crews worked alongside emergency responders. City officials said no homes were damaged and no one on the ground was hurt, but the closure of the runway pending the federal investigation has grounded based pilots who use the strip daily.

The crash site sits at the edge of the airpark property, where the bluff drops toward the San Joaquin River — a stretch of terrain that has drawn scrutiny in past general-aviation accidents nationally for the limited margin it leaves pilots who fall short of the runway. General aviation crashes, which include small private and recreational aircraft rather than commercial airliners, accounted for the vast majority of the roughly 300 aviation fatalities the FAA's general aviation safety program tracks in a typical recent year, even as the agency has reported the fatal accident rate trending downward.

What investigators will look at

The National Transportation Safety Board has taken over the inquiry, with the Federal Aviation Administration assisting, according to ABC30's coverage of the crash scene. The sheriff's office set up a perimeter around the wreckage to preserve evidence for federal investigators, who typically examine the same three categories in any general-aviation crash: the pilot's certification, training and medical history; the condition of the airframe and engine; and environmental factors such as weather, terrain and radio traffic in the moments before impact. Cases opened by the board are tracked through its public CAROL accident database, though a preliminary report on this crash was not yet available Saturday night.

Neither the sheriff's office nor federal investigators had released a cause as of early Sunday, and officials cautioned that a full determination could take the NTSB up to a year, with an initial preliminary report typically following within several weeks. No injuries were reported on the ground, and fire crews confined the blaze to the immediate crash site, keeping it from spreading down the bluff toward the river or up into the surrounding streets.

The AA-5 line flown Saturday was produced for more than three decades beginning in the early 1970s under a succession of manufacturers — American Aviation, Grumman American and later Gulfstream American — and remains common in general-aviation fleets at small airparks like Sierra Sky Park. Investigators have not said whether mechanical failure, weather or pilot error played a role, and sheriff's officials asked residents and onlookers to avoid the cordoned-off area while the wreckage remains in place for examination.

What happens next

The Fresno County Sheriff's Office said it would release the names of those killed once next of kin have been notified. The FAA and NTSB are expected to recover the wreckage for closer examination away from the site, a step investigators in comparable small-plane crashes have said can take several days. Fresno officials, meanwhile, said the surrounding neighborhood had returned to normal by Saturday evening, with power restored and the airpark's runway remaining closed pending the outcome of the investigation.