1 killed in small plane crash near Fall City

FALL CITY, Wash. — One man is dead after the plane he was flying crashed through trees and onto a King County golf course.

The KIRO 7 newsroom first heard about a small plane crash in Fall City and the calls for help on our police scanners around 8 a.m.  Chopper 7 flew over the scene at the Snoqualmie Falls Golf Course shortly after.

We don't know what caused the plane to go down yet -- the NTSB investigator tells us an official cause takes between six and nine months to determine.  But people who saw the plane crash about a mile from a small, private airstrip keep coming back to the fog.

"The fog was horrible, the visual, you couldn't see anything at all,” said Steve Griboski, a maintenance worker at the course.  Then suddenly he saw the plane crash through trees and onto the 18th fairway.

"I saw flames.  It was just brief, definitely an explosion though.  It looked like the engine was just shot right out of the airplane,” said another worker, Jonathan Nash.

A third worker had to bail out of his riding mower to escape the plane's path.

"I just jumped -- wasn't even sure what was going on,” Kevin Adcox explained.

"Everybody was frantic to go see if he was OK, and that's when I saw him and he was gone,” said Griboski of running up to the scene.

David Graham lives across the highway from the golf course.  He didn't see the crash but he saw what he believes was the plane in distress just moments before the crash.

"When I looked up and saw him through the fog he was 400 feet above our property,” Graham told us.

He thinks the plane may have just taken off, lost power, and was attempting to get back to the runway -- but again the fog was just so thick.

"I used to be a pilot.  I would never take off in fog like that but he might have been instrument rated so I don't know,” Graham concluded.

We tracked the plane to  an owner in Sammamish, the but the identity of the person killed has not been released.

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