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Ken DeCarle was sitting at a computer in his home on the northern tip of the island, drafting an email, when he heard an aircraft engine. It sounded as though the plane was approaching and then flying away, the engine noise rising and falling.

The flight radar appeared to bear out that pattern. By then the plane had dropped to about 600 metres and a speed near 185 km/h.

DeCarle has worked around airplanes and lives on a flight path, so he’s used to the sound of aircraft engines, but this was different.

“I knew exactly what happened. You could tell the airplane was in trouble on the way down. It sounded like the pilot was trying to regain control,” DeCarle said.

Photo by Facebook / PNG

Not far away, as she walked between her cottage and house, Randi Lynch heard a roar from overhead. She looked up in time to see a plane flying out of control, doing what appeared to be a roll low in the sky.

The plane disappeared from radar at 6:06 p.m. and Lynch watched it plunge to the earth less than 200 metres from where she stood, and explode on impact.

“It was so fast, like within a minute,” Lynch said, visibly shaken by what she saw. “The sky totally lit up.”

The impact was unlike anything neighbour Rick Mayes had felt.

“My place shook so bad and it was so loud that I thought it was an earthquake,” he said. “I’m serious, this house, I thought it was going over it was that strong.”

Mayes had been on the telephone to a friend who had called to wish him a happy 70th birthday when the crash happened.