Plane Crashes Just 8 Inches Away from Sleeping Couple Near Midway Airport

posted 7:45 a.m.; updated

A small cargo plane with engine trouble crashed into a house in the 6500 block of South Knox Avenue near Midway Airport at about 2:45 a.m. Tuesday morning as the pilot tried to return to the airport. The plane smashed through the living room and the wreckage came to rest just 8 inches from an elderly couple asleep in the back bedroom.

The couple are safe but the pilot, identified as Eric Howlett, 47, of Groveport, OH, died. An 84-year-old man and his 82-year-old wife, Raymond and Roberta Rolinskas, were able to get out of the house with the help of neighbors and police.

“A big part of the airplane was in their living room,” neighbor Luz Cazares, 62, told the Chicago Tribune, describing how she rushed to the house after hearing the crash. “I thought they were dead.”

Then she saw the couple waving to her from their bedroom window.

“I ran to the back of the yard, I jumped the fence and I knocked the back door of the kitchen and she opened the door and I took her outside.”

Police then went into the house and brought out her husband, the Tribune reports.

When the Chicago Fire Department arrived, they found fuel leaking from the plane. They quickly applied a foam to the fuel and prevented it from igniting. Firefighters then cut into the plane to remove the pilot’s body. Part of the floor of the house collapsed into the basement. The plane was moved away from the house Tuesday afternoon by a crane.

“They were in a bedroom next to the living room, and the living room is gone,” Chicago Fire Chief Michael Fox said. “Eight inches away. They were very lucky.”

The plane is an Aero Commander 500, a twin-engine turboprop craft, and it swooped down into house shortly after takeoff as Howlett tried to get back to the airport after experiencing engine trouble. The craft crashed through the living room and into the basement, with its tail section coming to rest on the neighbor’s roofline.

“He did not make it to the field. It looks he just went down just short of 31 Center,” an air traffic controller says in a recording broadcast on NBC Chicago.

The plane came down about about a quarter of a mile from the runway where it took off. FAA officials said the pilot was headed for Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling, according to its original flight plan, but the plan was amended shortly before takeoff and the pilot’s destination was Ohio State University Airport. The aircraft is registered to Central Airlines Inc. in Fairway, KS.

Howlett is a trained flight instructor, according to his LinkedIn page. He worked in marketing and drove a school bus part time, reports the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.

Neighbor Jeanine Venckus brought the Rolinskases into her home, telling reporters that they are friends of her parents.

The man told her he “heard a boom and went to get up and couldn’t walk into his front room or kitchen or anything, so they were quite bewildered,” she said. “The whole right side of the house is gone. Thank God their bedrooms were on the left.”

The two homes on either side were evacuated and remain empty as a precaution.