Two people are dead after a small plane crashed and caught fire on the runway at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport in San Diego on Monday evening. San Diego police confirmed the deaths, with the crash reported around 5:21 p.m. and emergency crews temporarily shutting down the municipal airfield to respond.
According to CBS 8, San Diego Fire-Rescue sent roughly 30 personnel to the scene as the small aircraft burned on the runway. The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department
said on social media that the airport would remain temporarily closed during emergency operations, and that its all-hazards crews were providing fire suppression and life-saving services at the scene. The department, which serves the City of San Diego, noted its social account is not monitored around the clock.
A Runway With A Troubled Recent History
Monday's crash adds to a string of aviation incidents that have put Montgomery-Gibbs under sustained scrutiny. The station's report situates the event amid what has become intense local focus on the airfield following multiple fatal crashes in recent years, most notably the May 2025 Cessna Citation II disaster that killed six people after the jet went down in thick fog near the airport.
That earlier crash, which slammed into the Murphy Canyon military housing neighborhood in Tierrasanta, damaged about 10 homes and displaced over 100 residents, according to KPBS. NTSB preliminary findings tied to that crash later revealed that the airport's approach runway alignment lights had been non-operational since March 2022, and that its weather reporting system was also inoperative at the time of the accident, per the same account from CBS 8. Repairs to those alignment lights had reportedly been delayed by environmental reviews.
The fallout from that crash has continued into the courts. In December 2025, Hoodline reported on a widow's wrongful-death suit tied to that same crash; the complaint had been filed that week.
Not The First Fatal Crash On The Field Itself
Montgomery-Gibbs has also seen fatal incidents directly on airport grounds before. On November 5, 2022, a pilot was killed when a single-engine Cirrus SR20 crashed, per the same CBS 8 archive.
The airport had taken steps to modernize safety operations before Monday's crash. In July 2025, Montgomery-Gibbs became the first general aviation airport in the country to deploy Saab's Aerobahn Runway and Surface Safety service under the FAA's Surface Awareness Initiative, giving air traffic controllers real-time GPS tracking meant to prevent airfield collisions, as Hoodline reported at the time in a story about the airport's first-ever runway safety system. The airport also began offering unleaded aviation gasoline in November 2024 as part of a city environmental initiative to cut lead emissions in surrounding neighborhoods, according to the Colorado Pilots Association.
A Busy Field With Limited Overnight Oversight
Montgomery-Gibbs, owned and operated by the City of San Diego, covers 456 acres and features three asphalt runways, serving as an FAA-designated reliever airport for San Diego International Airport, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It is one of the busiest general aviation facilities in California, logging more than 386,000 aircraft flight operations in 2024.
Aircraft operations are permitted around the clock at the airfield, according to the City of San Diego. The crash occurred Monday evening, but the airport's layered history of infrastructure gaps and fatal incidents continues to raise questions about oversight at one of the region's busiest general aviation hubs.
What Investigators Still Don't Know
Key questions remain open for federal and local investigators, including what caused the aircraft fire, whether the plane was landing or departing, and whether airfield surface conditions or lighting played any role in Monday's crash. Those questions echo unresolved issues from the airport's past incidents, and no findings have yet been released regarding Monday's fatalities.
