Peter Scullin and his wife were driving home from their country property on Tuesday morning, and had just left the Calder Freeway when a light plane hit the DFO Essendon shopping centre next to them.

They were driving almost directly underneath the plane's path as it came near the road.

When it hit, "there was a massive ball of flame – I could feel the heat even though my wife was driving and I was in the passenger seat with my window closed," Mr Scullin said.

Immediately after the impact, "parts of the plane landed on the beginning of the road on-ramp", Mr Scullin said.

The explosion, he said, had been "just like you see in a movie. The ball of flame went 30 or 40 feet into the air. We got out to see whether the outside of the car had had any paint blistering".

The couple pulled up amid "a burning smell that was a combination of aviation fuel and an explosion".

"And we thought 'My God, how lucky are we that we are still here?' We both looked at each other and thought that was the closest to death we are going to come."

Soon after, Mr Scullin learnt there were five people on board the plane. "What a terrifying moment on that plane it must have been."

Mr Scullin, a former mayor of a bayside council and a relative of former Prime Minister James Scullin, questioned the wisdom of having allowed the airport to expand with retail uses.

He said the pilot appeared to be trying to gain control of the plane when it hit the corner of the DFO.

"But it could just have easily landed in the middle of the DFO," he said. "You've got to ask questions about whether this was an accident that was always going to happen."

Premier Daniel Andrews was asked soon after, at a press conference, whether Essendon Airport should be shut down. He said that the airport was very important to Victoria.

"There are many thousands of passenger movements and also freight movements that come out of the Essendon Airport each and every year and it's an important transport asset to our state," Mr Andrews said.

"There will be some – and they are entitled to – who [will] want to have a … discussion and a debate about how suitable Essendon Airport is," Mr Andrews said. "The best thing to do now is to allow those processes to run their course – let's get the facts and then we can deal with it from there."

Another witness to the crash, who was not as close as Mr Scullin to the accident, had been dropping her children off at a primary school in nearby Strathmore. "I'm still shaking two hours later," said Natalie Galvin.

She said she seen "a huge fireball and black smoke fill the sky with papers and debris flying up in the air". She could "see a section of DFO on fire and something had clearly exploded – we didn't know at that point what had happened".

Nick Scali worker Grace Martin was having a coffee before work when she heard a plane overhead that sound louder than usual. She looked up and saw a plane "wobbling" as it flew a metre above the roof of the DFO building.

"I saw it fly over the top of me and it was shaking," Ms Martin said. "And that's when I ran away and heard the crash and saw the flames."

Ms Martin said it was a "surreal" experience. My heart almost jumped through my throat," she said. "It was pretty scary."