'You're in shock'; Witness describes the moments after deadly Watsonville mid-air collision

WATSONVILLE -- It was a typical Thursday afternoon for Mitch Valdez as he worked at the Napa Auto Parts store near the Watsonville airport. Then the building began to rumble.

Valdez and others raced out into the parking lot. They looked toward Watsonville Municipal Airport and a massive plume of black and white smoke soared skyward.

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff confirmed Friday that three people died as two small planes collided while trying to land at the local airport. The coroner has not released their identities.

"We are grieving tonight from this unexpected and sudden loss," Watsonville Mayor Ari Parker said in tweet. "I want to express my deepest and most heartfelt condolences."  

Valdez said he was stunned by what he saw.

"It (the impact of the collision) shook our building, rattled our doors," he told KPIX. "We ran outside to the parking lot. (There was) a massive plume of  black and white smoke and fire on the runway."

"It's like surviving an accident. You're in shock. You can't believe is is happening."

One of the planes crashed in a grassy area near a runway. The second slammed into a hanger, destroying the structure. Federal investigators will be on scene Friday, trying to determine what caused the crash.

The planes crashed shortly before 3 p.m. The city-owned airport does not have a control tower to direct aircraft landing and taking off.

There were two people aboard a twin-engine Cessna 340 and only the pilot aboard a single-engine Cessna 152 during the crash, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The pilots were on their final approaches to the airport before the collision, the FAA said in a statement. 

No one on the ground was injured. The airport has four runways and is home to more than 300 aircraft, according to its website. It handles more than 55,000 operations a year and is used often for recreational planes and agriculture businesses. 

The planes were about 200 feet in the air when they crashed, a witness told the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

Franky Herrera was driving past the airport when he saw the twin-engine plane bank hard to the right and hit the wing of the smaller aircraft, which "just spiraled down and crashed" near the edge of the airfield and not far from homes, he told the newspaper.

The twin-engine aircraft kept flying but "it was struggling," Herrera said, and then he saw flames at the other side of the airport.