The Piper Navajo that crashed into a parking lot Thursday night was flying remarkably low before spiralling out of control and nose-diving into the ground, an eyewitness told The Richmond Review Friday.

H.J. Cambie grad and area resident Cassandra Hrynkow was driving to the corner store when the plane's low altitude caught her eye.

"I just saw this plane flying and it looked like it was about to do a stunt or something..." she said. "And it just started spinning around and then it starts spiralling and nosediving...out of control."

The plane spiralled wingtip over wingtip about three times, she said, before plummeting nose-first and disappearing behind a row of commercial buildings on the 12000 block of Vickers Way and alongside the Bath Slough Trail.

"Then all of a sudden, this big flash of purple light went off in the sky, like it was lightning or something."

Hrynkow then rolled down her window and she could hear an explosion.

Her immediate instinct was to try to get to the scene to help and find out what happened, and she wasn't alone.

As many as 20 other people drove or walked to the scene before emergency crews arrived.

"I got out of my car, and everyone just started running towards it. It was this huge wreckage. There was a school bus in there...you couldn't recognize what was on fire. It was just this huge mass of burning rubble and then stuff started to explode."

A lone police officer then directed the onlookers to back away from the flaming scene and then sirens signalled the approaching firefighters and police.

"It was so massive and my first thought was if there was anybody on that plane, they weren't going to survive."

Hrynkow said she couldn't see whether the airplane's twin propellers were rotating before the crash.

Aviation crash investigator Alec Moffat, from Richmond-based R.J. Waldron and Co., said the plane spiralling may be indicative of a number of things, including that it had experienced an aerodynamic stall.

He explained that if the airflow over the plane's wings was suddenly disrupted, perhaps because of air turbulence caused by another aircraft, the plane could begin to behave erratically.

One wing tends to stall first, which would result in the plane spiralling, Moffat said.

The Piper Navajo had reportedly been coming in behind a large Air Canada Airbus passenger airplane.