A vintage airplane caught fire while flying over Oxnard and was forced to make a belly landing on a nearby beach Tuesday afternoon, narrowly missing a fisherman as it slid across the sand, officials said.

Neither of the two people inside the propeller-driven fighter plane was hurt, said Deborah Shane, a spokeswoman for the Oxnard Fire Department.

The T-28 aircraft came to rest within a half-mile stretch of sand at Mandalay Beach Park, in sight of the Oxnard Shores community.

William Wolf said he saw the orange plane flying low with an identical-looking aircraft moments before it crash-landed.

Wolf, who was working at a construction site near Fifth Street and Harbor Boulevard, said the two aircraft appeared to be doing aerobatic maneuvers.

Wolf said he suddenly heard a large bang from one of the aircraft.

"This huge fireball came out from underneath it," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. It was like a bad dream."

He said the airplane then descended toward the ocean, narrowly missing the Reliant Energy Plant near Mandalay Beach.

"I thought it was going to hit the power plant," said Wolf of Oxnard Shores.

Charolette McDonald said she had been driving in the Pierpont area of Ventura when she noticed the aircraft flying with a trail of smoke behind it.

"It was obvious that something was really wrong," McDonald said as she stood behind yellow tape police used to rope off the area around the plane.

The plane came to rest about 10 yards from the surf. Oxnard firefighters arrived within minutes and doused it with fire-retardant chemicals.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the cause of the crash landing.

The aircraft was to remain on the beach Tuesday night, said Deborah Shane, a spokeswoman for the Oxnard Fire Department. Exactly how the plane will be removed from the beach had yet to be determined.

Shane could not provide the names of the two people in the plane.

The aircraft, a T-28 Trojan Fennec, is a piston-engine-powered plane used by the U.S. armed forces for training from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

T-28s were also used extensively during the Vietnam War by the South Vietnamese Air Force. A T-28 was the first U.S. attack fixed-wing aircraft lost during that war. Two U.S. military personnel were killed when their T-28 was shot down in August 1962.

The particular plane that crash-landed Tuesday was used by the U.S. Forest Service in Albuquerque, N.M., from 1966 to 1972, according to www.warbirdregistry.org, a Web site that tracks old military aircraft. It is registered to Ed Hotelling of Prescott, Ariz.

Oxnard Shores resident Christine Braden said she knows of numerous instances in which aircraft have come down around Mandalay Beach Park.

"We have aircraft flying over here all the time since this is right in the (flight) path of Oxnard Airport," Braden said.

Staff writer Adam Foxman contributed to this report.