A small plane crash at a private airfield in Redland killed two people this morning.
Miami-Dade police recieved a 911 call reporting a downed plane at 10:22 a.m. When officers arrived in Redland, they found a bright yellow single-engine fixed-wing aircraft smashed into the ground about 1,000 feet from the Richards Field Airport landing strip.
Emergency rescuers pulled a white male pilot in his early 50s and a white female passenger in her 40s from the wreckage, but it was too late. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. They have not been identified yet.
Detective Álvaro Zabaleta said that police and firemen found the plane mostly intact, except that it's engine -- normally in front -- appeared to be smashed on top of the aircraft.
He added that the cause of the crash is still unknown, but that Richards Field did not have a manned observation tower. Instead, pilots are responsible for communicating with one another.
"It's hard to know at this point if there was any communication via radio done," Zabaleta said. "There is no way of knowing if they were calling 'mayday' or not."
The deadly crash comes just two weeks after another small plane made a miraculous landing into oncoming traffic on the Florida Turnpike. In that incident, both the pilot and his passenger lived.
And in May, a Beechcraft BE 18 went down near the 14000 block of Northwest 41st Avenue. It crashed into two vehicles before hitting a home and bursting into flames, killing its pilot.
