PEARSON, Ga. -- An Air Force F-16 fighter jet on a training mission crashed in rural Georgia Friday, killing the pilot and a woman on the ground and narrowly missing a resident who had been reading a Bible in her living room.
A sheriff's spokeswoman identified the crash victim on the ground as Marion Lanier, a cleaning woman who was making her weekly visit to a client's home in a predominantly residential area of southern Georgia's Atkinson County.
The jet went down in a ball of flames near Georgia Highway 441 around 9:40 a.m., sending black smoke billowing hundreds of feet into the sky until late afternoon.
The plane was carrying six practice bombs, but the crash impact caused none to blow up.
Six homes were damaged in the crash. Reporters at the scene said at least two of the houses were leveled, and the house where Lanier died appeared to have been destroyed by fire. Other houses had windows shattered.
A 73-year-old woman living on the other side of the highway narrowly escaped injury. Mabel Guthrie said she had walked out of her living room where she had been sitting and reading a Bible just before the crash.
A piece of the aircraft tore through the room a few minutes after she got up to telephone her daughter, striking the couch where she had been sitting.
'The Lord moves you out of the way when it's not your time to go,' Guthrie said.
The jet was flying in a 'two-ship formation' with another F-16 at the time of the crash, said Master Sgt. Pat Miller of Moody Air Force Base.
The jet was on a 'low-level routine training mission' from the base, about 40 miles away, to Lake George Weapons Range in Florida when the crash occurred, Miller said.
Officials could not immediately explain why the jet crashed north of the air base when it was due to fly south to Florida.
The plane went down about 1 miles north of Pearson, a sleepy rural town of some 2,000 people 60 miles from the Georgia-Florida border, said Kathleen Guthrie, executive assistant to the sheriff.
Deputy Commander Stu Mosby, in charge of the team of military investigators examining the crash, said no identifiable pieces of the aircraft had been recovered. The heavy damage probably means it will be 30 days before investigators can draw any conclusions about the crash, Mosby said.
'The last time the pilot was in contact with us was when he took off,' Mosby said, adding the transmission was routine. The deputy commander would release few details about the pilot, except to describe him as experienced.
Mosby confirmed the pilot ejected his fuel tanks before the crash, but held on to a practice sidewinder missile and six practice bombs.
The missile carried no detonator or motor, and the six bombs had low-detonation charges that did not explode on impact. The jet also carried an unknown number of 20mm bullets, some of which exploded in the fire triggered by the crash, Mosby said.
Mosby said investigators did not know if there was a midair explosion before the crash, as some witnesses reported.
Lucy Taft and her husband, Vance, were in the yard of their farmhouse when the plane went down some 80 yards away. A patch of woodland kept the couple from seeing the crash, but Lucy Taft said they felt its impact.
Several members of the community complained about the low flights often practiced over Pearson, saying they have become too dangerous.
'If they're going to have these bombing runs, they ought to have them over Okefenokee Swamp,' said Aaron Royals. 'What I'm getting at is they don't have to fly over Pearson, Ga.'
The plane crashed about a mile from Atkinson County High School. Students said they felt the impact of the crash.
Andrew Royals, who is the son of Aaron and an 11th grader at the school, said the crash shook lights in the halls and cracked walls in mobile classrooms.
Friends of Marion Lanier, the dead housekeeper, described her as a hard-working woman in her late 50s or early 60s who attended church regularly.
She was in the middle of her weekly visit to the home of Jack and Kelly Keaton when the home was struck by either the jet or its debris.
Kelly Keaton, who works with a visiting nurses program in town, said it was a miracle she and her husband were not home when the jet crashed.
'I usually don't go in early. I just happened to go in,' she said. She added her husband had been sick and planned to stay home from work Friday, but his supervisor called him Thursday night and sent him out of town suddenly.
The F-16, nicknamed the 'Fighting Falcon,' is a single-engine aircraft capable of flying at twice the speed of sound and up to 50,000 feet.
The aircraft is usually a single-seater, but can be converted into a two-seater for training missions, Air Force officials said.
Mosby said the most recent crash involving a Moody jet was Feb. 10, 1988, when mechanical failure forced a pilot to eject safely. No one was injured, and no damage was reported to private property.
In May 1989, a trainer jet out of Moody accidentally dropped a 500-pound bomb in west Georgia. It blew up in a wooded area, narrowly missing some houses. The Air Force blamed a faulty bomb rack.
