Atlanta plane crash: Four dead after jet crashes into Georgia football field

Aircraft came down less than two miles away from the airport where it took off

The field where the plane crashed is still being investigated. Atlanta Fire Rescue / Twitter

All four people aboard a business jet have died after it crashed into a park near Atlanta, fire officials in the city said.

The Cessna Citation V came down shortly after taking off from Fulton County Airport, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said, adding that it had flown for just just a-mile-and-a-half before it crashed into a football field.

The plane was registered to Wei Chen, CEO of Memphis-based Sunshine Enterprise, Inc - which employed more than 400 local people.

There were no reported injuries to anyone on the ground, but broken pieces of the plane flew off in several directions and damaged one house near English Park, about 20 miles from Atlanta.

The plane was bound for Memphis.

Mike McAnnally, president of a subsidiary of Chen's company, Stepup Scaffold, confirmed Mr Chen's death. “He was a remarkable man, and the true American dream,” Mr McAnnally told the newspaper Commercial Appeal.

Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash.

Atlanta Fire Rescue said that after crews arrived on the scene, they put out the fires, but it was clear that there were no survivors.

Spokesman Sergeant Cortez Stafford said that the tail of the plane was mostly intact, but the rest was not.

“The aircraft is basically completely destroyed. It looks like it slid through the field,” he told a news conference. “Not a lot of pieces left.”