SAN FRANCISCO, May 27 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed Sunday when their plane crashed near the Petaluma Municipal Airport in northern California on the U.S. west coast, authorities said.
The crash caused no injuries on the ground, and its cause is being investigated, the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper said.
The home-made style plane was a RV-6 single-engine, two-seater aircraft built from a kit in 1986, which is very popular among aviation enthusiasts for being a low-cost, high-performance "airplane capable of aerobatics," the newspaper quoted a retired pilot as saying.
He said a lot of the planes are built and flying safely, but it still carries risk to fly them.
Allen Kenitzer, spokesman for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), said the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will probe the crash.
No further details about the two victims have been disclosed so far.
The air crash was the second fatal incident of its kind near the Petaluma airport in two months. On April 6, a small plane crash-landed into a ravine a few miles east of the airport and killed its pilot.
