The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are trying to figure out what caused a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza plane to crash in Murfreesboro Sunday afternoon.

The 79-year-old pilot, Robert Kinney of Hendersonville, survived.

Federal authorities are looking through the wreckage to see, among things, if the engine failed.

Witnesses reported hearing the engine stalled.

The low-flying planes are a major concern for people living in the Northfield Lodge apartment complex next to where the aircraft went down.

Some people who live in the apartment complex said they knew it would only be a matter of time before this happened.

“Most of the time they are pretty controlled and seems alright, but it was pretty scary,” Brittany League said. “Just like this, this is how they come in. Flying low like that over a heavy residential area something like that is going to happen, it’s lucky it wasn’t, you know, 50-yards the other way. It would have been in the building.”

The plane crash shook neighbor Ken McCauley to the core.

“It scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t even sleep last night waiting for a plane to come through the front door,” McCauley said.

McCauley moved Northfield Lodge on Labor Day and he’s been worried about the low-flying planes ever since.

“I knew this day was coming. Its constant planes come over here 24-7,” he said. “They come over here too low for me. They barely make it over the treetops.”

Murfreesboro Municipal Airport officials said the runway is next to the apartment complex, but the planes do not fly directly over as they are landing or taking off.

The airport is one of the busiest in Tennessee since it’s a flight training facility for Middle Tennessee State University and Murfreesboro aviation students.

“Besides what people see on the ground as far as airport facilities, there’s a lot of airspace around there that’s protected by the FAA, and it’s something that you can’t see, but it’s an area that we watch over,” airport manager Chad Gehrke said. “We survey it every year to make sure that airspace is clear to protect the airports, the pilots that come in and out and the people on the ground as well.”

Bill Green said a neighbor who witnessed the plane go down told him what happened.

“The lady talked to the pilot after they got him out and he told her that his engine just lost power while he was taking off. He lost power. I’m assuming the engine quit and he could not do nothing but go down and landed in that thicket over there.”

The NTSB and FAA are investigating the crash to determine what caused it to go down.

An aviation recovery team spent Monday carefully removing the wrecked plane that went down in Murfreesboro Sunday from a thick tree line.

Crews AMF Aviation, based at the Springfield-Robertson County Airport, spent Monday removing the plane from a wooded area next to Northfield Lodge Apartments.

Parts of the plane had to be cut to be removed, while other parts had to be preserved so the FAA and NTSB can conduct their investigation as to what happened.

“Our responsibility is to assist the FAA and NTSB in accident investigations in that we show up with the men and equipment to facilitate the removal of the aircraft,” said AMF Aviation employee Chris Ferraraccio. “This one, in particular, was pretty straightforward not very difficult. We had very good access to it, we were able to get the vehicles very close. The brush was really not that thick we didn’t have to use any special equipment to extricate this aircraft.”

The plane will be taken to the aircraft recovery team’s facilities in Springfield where the FAA will finish their investigation.

The aircraft recovery team said they respond to about 60-plus plane crashes a year.