Re: rattle and smoke - I'm very wary of eye-witness reports of anything. Case in point, you can have a simple sea-plane crash into Auckland harbour in clear daylight in full view of the city and plenty of ferries and other boats, and some saw it coming in to land and crashing, whilst others saw it taking off and crashing... in the same article on the NZ Herald...
(It was a wheels-down landing on water)...