UPDATE: 6 Dead After Plane Crashes into Gaithersburg House: Reports

Updated at 7 p.m.

Montgomery County emergency officials say six people were killed Monday – three in a plane that crashed into a Gaithersburg house and three on the ground -- setting several homes on fire.

County Fire and Rescue Services spokesman Pete Piringer said via Twitter about 10:45 a.m. Monday that the crash happened on Drop Forge Lane off Snouffer School Road. The twin-engine 10-passenger plane came down near houses on Drop Forge Lane near Blue Smoke Lane, he said.

Tracy Everett, an eyewitness to the crash, said he saw the plane flying erratically just a couple hundred feet above the treetops.

The trouble plane “was up, down, left, right, struggling to keep his position,” Everett told Montgomery Community Media.

The plane veered right, then made a sharp left before taking a “nose barrel dive into the neighborhood,” Everett said. “Just a bad scene.”

At about 11:40 a.m. Piringer updated that firefighters had gained control of the fires. Several homes were damaged by the downed plane, he said.

Three people on the plane died, Piringer says, and rescuers searched throughout the afternoon for several occupants of a house.

About 6:45 p.m. Piringer tweeted that officials have confirmed six fatalities from the crash, including one adult and two children in the house at 19733 Drop Forge Lane.

The crash site is less than a mile from the Montgomery County Airpark.

The cause of the crash is not yet known. Two homes had fire damage and one or two other houses had property damage, Piringer said.

Montgomery County Fire Chief Steve Lohr said at a news briefing that the most heavily damaged house is structurally unstable. Rescuers are trying to shore up the remaining structure to continue searching for victims in the house; authorities don’t know if anyone was in the house when the crash happened.

Residents in all the other surrounding houses have been accounted for, Lohr said.

Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are at the crash site.

Patch will update this story as details become available.

»Photos from MCFRS spokesman Pete Piringer via Twitter