A pilot who once ditched a plane on water crashed a twin-engine aircraft into a pair of Connecticut homes yesterday — killing two children on the ground along with himself, his teenage son and possibly two others.
Bill Henningsgaard, 54, and his son, Max, 17, who lived in Washington state, were heading from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to New Haven as part of an East Coast college tour when they went down in the town of East Haven at around 11:25 a.m.
The impact ignited a huge fireball and ripped the homes apart — killing a 1-year-old and a 13-year-old inside.
ZUMAPRESS.com
'IT'S TOTAL DEVASTATION': A fragment of the twin-engine plane sits in the wreckage-strewn back yards of the East Haven houses hit in yesterday's disaster.
FATHER & SON: Max Henningsgaard,17, and his dad, Bill, who was piloting the plane, were among those killed in the crash yesterday.
Authorities said there may have been another person killed in the house and another passenger on the plane and that the final death toll could be as high as six.
The children's unidentified mother ran outside in a panic and begged her neighbors for help.
"She was screaming, 'Get my kids, get my kids! Help, help!' " said local mechanic Dennis Karjanis, 62. "Two other fellas on the street came over, and they ran in there. They couldn't find the kids. We just weren't getting anywhere.
"Then bang! Everything blew up. The mother was seriously distraught and crying. She fell down on her knees. She was pounding on the ground. We just couldn't find where the kids were.
"It's beyond words how sad this all is. My heart breaks for her."
Robert Barker, 45, said he ran inside the damaged home immediately after the crash but his search for the tragic children proved futile.
"I ran out and asked the woman where are the kids at?" Barker said.
The hysterical mother motioned downstairs and yelled, "The room to the right!" he said.
"I looked to the right, where the kids were supposed to be, but that's where the plane landed," said Barker, who fled the house just before it went up in flames.
Airplane mechanic Robert Mallory, who lives nearby, said he heard a troubling noise coming from the Rockwell International Turbo Commander 690B just before it went down.
"It sounded like someone stuck a stick in a lawnmower," he told the Hartford Courant. "It just stopped."
Wilson Idrovo said he was working on a house when his son said, "Daddy, the airplane is falling down."
East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo said, "It's total devastation in the back of the home."
The tragic father and son took off from Teterboro just before 10:50 a.m. as they headed to Tweed New Haven Airport.
Henningsgaard had to abort his first landing attempt and was on his way to a second attempt.
Tweed's airport manager, Lori Hoffman-Soares, said the pilot had been in communication with air-traffic control and never issued a distress call.
"All we know is that it missed the approach and continued on," she told The Associated Press.
The National Transportation Safety Board was on the scene last night probing the tragedy in the working-class neighborhood.
This wasn't Henningsgaard's first plane crash. He went down in the Columbia River in Washington state in 2009 with his elderly mother on board. After that crash, he bought a new plane — the one that went down yesterday.
"Bought a plane to replace the one that turned out not to be amphibious," he later joked on Facebook.
Henningsgaard blogged about the first crash on the Web site SVP Seattle, blaming engine failure.
"I took off in a small plane from Astoria [in Oregon], taking my 84-year-old mother up to Seattle to watch my daughter Lucy, aged 15, in her high school play," wrote Henningsgaard, a former employee of Microsoft and the acting executive director and board chairman of Eastside Pathways.
"Ten minutes into the flight, at 8,000 feet and already across the Columbia River and over the Washington coast, the engine coughed briefly. Ten seconds later it died."
The pilot was able to land the plane on the river, where he and his mother exited the plane to stand on a wing.
"But what I felt was fear. Fear of the exhaustion and panic and very possibly death as we tried for shore. Desperation that I couldn't come up with any alternative to trying to make that swim. Shame that I put my mother into this situation."
Luckily, another pilot witnessed the crash and a rescue boat plucked the two from the wing.
"That moment stands out in my memory like a blessing, a gift," he wrote. "Seeing that boat meant that we were going to live."
rharshbarger@nypost.com
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