The pilot of a small banner plane was killed when the aircraft crashed on a Hollywood roadway Wednesday, erupting in a ball of flames and shocking witnesses who watched it go down.
The crash happened around 12:35 p.m. near the 450 block of North Park Road, next to the parking lot of a Target and not far from Memorial Regional Hospital.
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Video posted on social media showed the yellow Piper PA-25-235 plane crashed and in flames on the street with thick black smoke billowing into the air.
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Arielle Thony, who works in a building nearby, said she and her coworkers saw the plane go down.
"We saw the yellow plane coming down and it was riding very low and we were very concerned for it. A few seconds later we saw the banner fall," she said. "We all ran to the window and unfortunately we saw the plane in flames and it was definitely a sight to see, it was horrible."
Officials with the city of Hollywood said fire rescue crews responded and found the single-engine plane fully engulfed in flames.
Aerial footage showed the burned wreckage of the plane on the roadway being doused with foam by fire rescue crews.
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"The plane absolutely went up in flames, another person said they saw it just absolutely nosedive out of the sky," said Maddie Barcy, who works at a nearby optometrist's office.
Officials said the fire was extinguished but the pilot was killed. The pilot's identity wasn't released.
No other injuries were reported and no vehicles were hit by the plane, officials said.
The National Transportation Safety Board was contacted to investigate the crash, officials said. The Federal Aviation Administration is also investigating.
According to the FAA, the plane belongs to Aerial Banners, which uses planes to advertise for companies. The crash happened after the plane had taken off from North Perry Airport, NTSB officials said.
The company was linked to five crashes and emergency landings from 2014 to 2019, NBC6 found. A crash from 2019 had had some of the worst wreckage after the plane crashed into the side of a condo building near Fort Lauderdale and plummeted 14 stories onto a pool deck, killing the pilot.
NBC6 reached out to Aerial Banners for a statement Wednesday and was waiting to hear back.
A person who said he's a friend of the pilot came to the scene later Wednesday and said the victim was in his mid-20s and had been a commercial pilot for several years. He also said the victim had just started learning how to fly banner planes and said Wednesday's flight was either his first or second time flying one.
North Park Road was expected to be closed at the scene throughout the day and into Thursday. Anyone going to the hospital who usually takes that section of Park Road was asked to use an alternate route.
No other information was immediately known.
Check back with NBC6 for updates.
