West Virginia State Police say the man who died Thursday night in a plane crash in Jackson County was from Indiana. William Huff, 61, had some type of problem and missed his Indiana landing site. 

The FAA says a Cirus Model SR -22, a single engine plane, went down about ten miles outside the Jackson County Airport in Ravenswood.

The agency also says F-16 fighter planes followed the plane until it began to go down.

Bryan Lawrence lives across the river from the crash site in Portland, Ohio. He and his friends witnessed the plane go down. At first, they heard what they thought was a watercraft engine.

"We heard this for probably three to five minutes. All at once we saw a plane come up. We saw what we believed to be the bottom because we could see the lights on the bottom of the wings," Lawrence said.

Rescue crews in Jackson County responded to the scene at around 10 p.m. according to dispatchers there. They released little information beyond that.

At around 11:20 p.m., MetroNews got in contact with the Federal Aviation Administration confirming the crash. Officials told us the plane was traveling from York, Nebraska to Eagle Creek, Indiana.

They said air traffic control had lost contact with the pilot earlier that night. The plane was short on fuel, and they believed the lone pilot on board was incapacitated.

Eventually the plane had exhausted its fuel about the time Mr. Lawrence saw the plane go down.

"All at once it veered towards West Virginia. We didn't see the impact. We just saw the ball of fire from the aircraft crashing," Lawrence says.

The National Transportation Safety Board will be the scene most of the day Friday taking a look at the crash site.

The crash is the third fatal plane crash in West Virginia this year. The other two occurred near Tri-State Airport in Wayne County.