Strange Noise Preceded Crash, Witnesses Say

Henry and Ivan Nguyen watch a lot of airplanes fly over the roof of their office, but this one was different. It didn’t sound right.

“The plane was making a whistling noise--like fireworks,” said Ivan Nguyen, who had stepped out for a cigarette break when he witnessed Saturday’s crash of a private jet.

“I looked up, and I thought the plane was making a U-turn,” said Nguyen, 26, of Garden Grove. “Then it headed straight down. Boom.”

Henry and Ivan Nguyen, friends but not related, were outside their office on McGaw Avenue, taking a break from their jobs in the stockroom of Physician Sales Services, which sits just under the flight path at John Wayne Airport.

Both men said the plane appeared to be in the middle of a wobbly turn when it lost power and headed abruptly down. Both said the disaster was preceded by an eerie sound.

“We heard a noise, and it wasn’t normal,” said Henry Nguyen, 24, of Stanton. “We knew something was wrong.”

When the vintage plane plunged into the building across the street, the pair grabbed a fire extinguisher, called a security guard to accompany them and ran to help.

Boosting themselves on Henry Nguyen’s shoulders, the three scaled a low wall on one side of the building and climbed to the roof.

“We wanted to help the people in the plane,” Henry Nguyen said, pointing to footprints on his shirt where the others had stood.

Once on the roof, the men said, they saw billows of smoke rising and the plane’s tail pointing skyward through a hole that the aircraft had punched through the roof.

The men ran to the edge of the hole and looked down. At that point, they said, they knew there was little hope that anyone inside the plane had survived.

“The whole airplane was on fire,” Ivan Nguyen said. “There was smoke and fire everywhere.”

The men tried their fire extinguisher, but it was useless against the mounting flames. They could only stand by until a fleet of fire engines arrived a few minutes later.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Henry Nguyen said later.