HONOLULU — Eleven people are dead after a small plane, which had a 2016 scare, carrying skydivers crashed near an airfield in Hawaii on Friday.

• In 2016, the plane's engine stalled three times during flight
• FAA says it was pilot error at the time
• Witnesses describe Friday's fatal crash

The plane was engulfed in fire near the fence line away from the runway.

Honolulu fire officials said family members of those on board the aircraft were on the ground when the crash happened and may have seen the plane go down.

Steven Tickemyer said he saw the plane take flight, get 75 to 100 feet (22 to 30 meters) off the ground and turn away from the mountain range nearby.

He said the plane then started to nosedive and flip over belly forward so that it was upside down. The aircraft then flipped over again and hit the ground nose first. There was an explosion when it hit the ground.

This all transpired in about 20 to 30 seconds, said Tickemyer, who watched from a beach across the street where he was attending a friend's small wedding ceremony.

He and his friends hopped in his truck, called 911 and drove over to help. They screamed to see if anyone would respond, but no one did, he said.

This is the worst civilian aviation accident in the U.S. since 2011 at the Reno Air Show in Nevada that killed the pilot and 10 spectators.

Officials in Hawaii initially reported that nine people had died and that three of them were customers of the skydiving company operating the plane and that six were employees.

But the Hawaii Department of Transportation tweeted Saturday that officials later "confirmed there were 11 people on board the plane" and no survivors. They were not identified.

The flight was operated by the Oahu Parachute Center skydiving company. The ratio of employees to customers aboard suggested that tandem jumps may have been planned in which the customers would have jumped while attached to experienced skydivers, Tim Sakahara, a spokesman for the Hawaii Department of Transportation, told reporters.

Witness Wylie Schoonover saw the plane flying over trees while driving from a nearby YMCA camp after picking up a friend. Then she saw smoke billowing from the airfield and drove over.

There was an "insane amount of fire," she said.

"It didn't even look like a plane. A bunch of people were asking 'what is this?' It was completely gone," Schoonover said.

The same plane was involved in a terrifying midair incident three years ago in Northern California that prompted the 14 skydivers aboard to jump earlier than planned to safety.

In that 2016 incident near Byron, California, the twin-engine plane stalled three times and spun repeatedly before the pilot at that time managed to land it safely, the National Transportation Safety Board said in an investigative report. The report blamed pilot error and said that the plane rotated nine times during one of the three spins it experienced.

Investigators found that the plane had lost a piece of horizontal stabilizer and that the plane's elevator had broken off. The plane was also too heavily weighted toward the back, which was also blamed on the pilot.

The plane with two turboprop engines was manufactured in 1967, FAA records said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.