N.J. Plane Crash Kills 3

A local official says two employees at the Linden, New Jersey, airport advised the pilot of a small plane that crashed Friday not to take off in the rain.

The single-engine 1964 model Beech Bonanza plane took off anyway and crashed six minutes later in Newark, killing all three people on board and injuring more than 20 people on the ground.

A federal investigator says the plane reported an instrument problem at least three times before the crash.

The plane was heading for Dulles Airport in Virginia.

The three people on board were identified as Itzhak Jacoby, who recently retired from the National Institutes of Health; his wife Gail, who worked at the National Institute on Aging; and their 13-year-old daughter.

A neighbor in Bethesda, Maryland, says Itzhak Jacoby was an experienced pilot who had flown for the air force in Israel, where he was born.

Residents of the largely residential neighborhood in Newark say the deadly plane crash sounded like a bomb, CBS News Correspondent Sam Litzinger reports.

Fifteen-year-old Quanarah Sims said the crash shook her house.

"We went out and we saw body parts," including a severed arm, she said.

Witnesses said the plane spun out of control, hit a tree and a factory, setting it on fire.

The plane sent fiery debris raining down on cars and sheared the roof off of one, critically burning a man. The plane broke apart as it continued down the block, with some parts landing in a cemetery, before it smashed into the side of a closed Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

One body landed on the grass and sidewalk next to the restaurant. The two other bodies were found in the street.

"All the cars on the block were on fire," said Rhonda Savage, who lives in the neighborhood.

"It is a tragedy as is," said Newark Mayor Sharpe James, "but it could have been a row of houses fifty feet away as opposed to the abandoned building."

Ibrhim Hussien, 32, was one of three workers on the first floor of the factory when the plane hit. All three managed to escape without injury. The other two floors were unoccupied.

"I heard something like a bomb," said Hussien. "It shook the building."

They ran outside, and Hussien saw that "everything is destroyed outside; the cars, the building."

Investigators are not exactly sure what caused the crash, but officials say the pilot did report engine trouble just moments before impact.