The remains of a home hit by a private jet in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on Monday. Photo: Montgomery County Fire & Rescue Service

Gaithersburg, Maryland: A small private jet slammed into a house in this Washington DC suburb on Monday US time, killing a woman and her two young sons inside the home and three people on the aircraft.

Marie Gemmell, 36, and her two sons, three-year-old Cole and one-month-old Devon,  were found in a second-floor bathroom. She was lying on top of her young sons in an apparent effort to shield them from the smoke and fire, said police Captain Paul Starks.

Her husband and a school-age daughter were not at home and were accounted for, police said.

The wreckage of the Embraer EMB-500 twin-engine jet. Photo: AP

The fuselage of the jet crashed into the front lawn of an adjacent home, which was heavily damaged by fire, and investigators believe one of its wings, which had fuel inside, was sheared off and tore through the front of the Gemmell home, said Robert Sumwalt, a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) member.

Advertisement

Witnesses reported seeing and hearing a secondary explosion after the plane hit the ground.

The two-storey, wood-frame home was gutted. The first floor was nearly completely blown out and smoke drifted from a gaping hole in what was left of the collapsing roof. No one was injured in the adjacent homes that also had major damage.

Maryland firefighters outside the home of Marie Gemmell, who was killed along with her two young sons. Photo: AP

The founder and chief executive of a clinical research organisation was among those on the plane. Health Decisions of Durham, North Carolina, said in a news release that  doctor Michael Rosenberg was among those killed.

Rosenberg was a pilot who crashed a different plane in Gaithersburg on March 1, 2010, according to a government official who asked not to be named. Investigators are still trying to determine if Rosenberg was at the controls at the time of Monday's crash.

Fred Pedreira, 67, who lives near the crash site, said he had just returned home from the grocery store and was parking his car when he saw the jet and immediately knew something was wrong.

"This guy, when I saw him, for a fast jet with the wheels down, I said, 'I think he's coming in too low'," Mr Pedreira said. "Then he was 90 degrees - sideways - and then he went belly-up into the house and it was a ball of fire. It was terrible."

The Embraer EMB-500/Phenom 100 twin-engine jet, which seats six people, was on approach to Montgomery County Airpark, which is about 1.6 kilometres from the crash site, officials said.

A team of NTSB investigators recovered the cockpit voice and flight data recorders from the plane's wreckage.

AP