New York, Feb 6 (IANS) An 18-foot-long piece of a cargo plane broke off and smashed into a mall parking lot near Miami international airport Friday.

No one was injured when the car-sized piece of the plane hit the Dillard Mall's parking lot at Miami International Mall, according to the Miami Herald. The newspaper said the cargo plane, coming from Chile, was descending to land when the huge panel came off and crashed into the parking lot.

The cargo plane, however, landed safely.

'The Atlas Air Cargo 747 had left Santiago, Chile, and was on its final approach to runway 9L when the piece fell into the parking lot,'' the newspaper quoted Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, as saying.

'We got lucky today. If this had been on a weekend, this would have been a real problem,'' the newspaper quoted area police chief Ricardo Gomez as saying.

'There was a loud thunder and it looked like something that blew off a truck or something. It fell over a tree and it blew into the parking lot,'' Jorge Tadeo, who saw the crash sitting in his car, told the newspaper.

'You look at the piece and it's shaped like a wing. No one thinks of a plane falling,'' he said.