Publix Plane Crash Footage Released (VIDEO)
New footage has been released of a small plane that crashed into the roof of a Publix supermarket in DeLand, Fla., Monday night, spewing wreckage over the store and injuring five people.
The latest footage of the wreckage was taken by a sherriff's helicopter, and shows an aerial view of the supermarket's roof, with fire spewing out of the hole left by the plane.
The plane, described as a "Seawind 3000, an amateur-built experimental amphibious aircraft" by WESH.com, which had two people on board and took off half a mile away from the DeLand Municipal Airport at around 7:30 Monday night. So far there is no explanation for the crash, which resulted in a gaping hole inside the supermarket's rooftop, five injured people and wreckage strewn over the store.
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Among the injured were the pilot and passenger inside the plane and three grocery shoppers; there were no casualties.
"We are going to attempt to get the aircraft out today," said Senior Air Safety Investigator for the NTSB Luke Schiada. "We will have to clear out some of the debris around the aisle. The fact that it's so fragmented helps in the sense of the removal of the airplane, because there aren't a lot of big pieces."
Although experimental planes such as this one do not have black boxes which store information and can help officials determine the cause of the crash, the Seawind 3000 has a GPS on board which can help shed light on the incident.
"I was sitting on my back porch and I just heard a big explosion," said one unidentified observer who lives in the area. "I came out to see what it was and saw the smoke billowing out of the top of Publix."
A Publix spokeswoman shared that food quality and safety is their top concern at the moment, and so they will be discarding of items that may have been affected by the debris.
Video footage of the Publix plane crash:
