Erick Ramirez said planes and helicopters sometimes sound like they're so close to his house that the noise scares his children.

Ramirez lives in the Meadowbrook Farm subdivision off Ironbridge Road, a few miles from the Chesterfield County Airport where a plane took off Sunday and crashed into a house about 5 miles away, killing the pilot and passenger and critically injuring a woman in the home.

"It's very scary, because we're right here, too," Ramirez said. "You feel very secure in your house. You never really expect" a plane to hit it.

There are 3,543 homes within a 2-mile radius of the Chesterfield airport, according to county officials, and fewer than 100 within about a half-mile radius.

More than 200 flights take off and land each day, and more than 75,000 annually, making Chesterfield's airport among the 10 busiest in the state, according to the Virginia Department of Aviation. It's fourth-largest in Virginia for the number of planes based there, about 140.

The airport is used primarily by private planes and corporate aircraft as an alternative to Richmond International Airport.

Crashes "can happen anytime, anywhere, because planes fly all over the sky," said Chesterfield Airport manager Charles Dane. The statistics, however, "show a pretty small percentage of that possibility."

Down the street from Ramirez in Meadowbrook Farm, Brittany Hicks called the crash a fluke tragedy.

"You hear the planes" over the house, she said. "But I've never been scared."
Contact Holly Prestidge at (804) 649-6945 or hprestidge@timesdispatch.com.