1 injured, power restored for 1,800 following Cape Coral plane crash

CAPE CORAL, Fla. One person was injured Friday morning after a small plane crashed near downtown Cape Coral.

A Cessna 172 crashed on the 1500 block of Miramar Street around 10 a.m., the Federal Aviation Authority said, prompting several evacuations in the area.

Several people rushed to help the pilot, who was on the ground bleeding and cut up.

“I can’t get the image out of my mind,” witness Jess Myers said.

Others like Linda Biondi are still in shock about what happened.

“When we finally realized it was a plane that came down, we were like, ‘Oh my God this is unbelievable. How could he be so low? What did he hit?'” she said. “He hit the poles, I guess, and that’s what flipped him over.”

The pilot, who was the only person on the plane, was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Approximately 1,800 customers lost power Friday morning before it was restored around 2:20 p.m., the Lee County Electric Co-Op said.

Grace Community School, located near the crash scene, urged parents to immediately pick up their children due to the power outage:

Prior to the crash, the pilot told air traffic controllers at Page Field that he was losing engine power.

“I got an engine losing RPM,” he said, according to radio traffic. “I may have to put it down over here, I can’t make it to the…I may not make it. I may not make the bridge! I can’t restart engine is out.”

Shane Kearney, a pilot from Ireland who’s vacationing with family in Cape Coral, says there are many complexities that lead to a crash like this.

“The worst thing we can do at the start of an accident is to guess,” he said. “So it’s always a chain of events. There’s always a number of things that will go wrong before an airplane will crash. It won’t just be one thing, it will be a number of things that will have led to it. It’s always best to wait until the end of the investigation to find out what it was.”

Miramar Street is likely to remain closed for much of Friday night, Cape Coral police said.

Friday’s crash is the second involving a small plane within the past two weeks.

A Piper PA-28-181 aircraft crashed into Chico’s Day Care, 11215 Metro Pkwy., following takeoff from Page Field on June 24. The passenger was killed and the pilot was hospitalized with serious injuries.