COVINGTON, Ga. — Federal officials were investigating Friday, April 22, after police said there were no survivors aboard a small plane that crashed into a storage yard and exploded on impact near General Mills’ Covington plant. 

Covington Police Capt. Ken Malcom said Friday there were two passengers aboard the Cessna 340 aircraft. 

The victims’ remains were sent to the GBI Crime Lab in Decatur for identification, he said. 

“This is a horribly tragic situation. We are working very hard on leads to help identify the two victims,” Malcom said. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was investigating to find out the cause, he said. 

NTSB spokesperson Peter Knudson said an NTSB investigator was working with the Covington Fire Department Friday to locate the remains of the charred aircraft for inspection at another location, Knudson said.

Knudson confirmed the plane’s owner was receiving flight instruction on “touch-and-go landings” when the incident occurred. 

The incident was reported around 6:45 p.m. after the plane took off from Covington Municipal Airport in a northeast direction and crashed about a half-mile away in an isolated area where tractor-trailers were stored on the General Mills grounds, Malcom said.

He said the plane hit some tractor-trailers on the ground about 100 yards east of the Harland Drive entrance to the plant near Industrial Boulevard in northeast Covington. Anyone aboard the plane died after it burst into flames on impact, Malcom said. 

“According to witnesses, they believe the plane was having trouble gaining altitude,” Malcom said, speaking to reporters near the Harland Drive entrance. 

“They could hear the engine trouble. Suddenly, the plane veered to the right and immediately went right down and crashed into the lot behind us — the General Mills plant that produces cereal here in our area.

“The plane went down in an isolated area here on the lot behind us near where they store tractor-trailers. The plane came down into four, what appeared to be, empty trailers.

“There’s a lot of charred metal back there,” he said.

However, no one on the ground was injured and it occurred in a fenced area that was roughly 400 yards away from General Mills’ production plant which operates around the clock. 

Malcom said he did not believe that workers had to be evacuated from the plant. 

“The fire was contained in the isolated area,” he said.

A witness, identified as Roger Boyd, told reporters he was driving home from Home Depot when he saw the plane was “going real slow.”

Boyd said he noticed the twin-propeller plane was not operating normally because it was about 50 yards in the air and “kind of floating.”

“It was gliding very, very slowly,” Boyd said. “I thought they were doing some sort of training exercise.” 

Malcom said plane crashes involving fatalities around Covington Airport have been rare in his three decades with the city police department.

He said firefighters from agencies in addition to the two local agencies responded to the scene because of the possibility the crash formed a wide debris field or struck multiple structures. 

However, most turned back after seeing it was contained in a comparatively small area, he said.