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A small plane carrying three people had made six attempts to land in the thick fog around New York City on Sunday night and was heading for a seventh before it ran out of fuel above Long Island.

The plane, a Cessna 172, was not going to make it to an airport, and as it hurtled instead toward a residential area in suburban Valley Stream, N.Y., a disaster seemed imminent.

The aircraft first clipped the roof of a church, then several power lines, local officials said, before becoming entangled in the cables like a fly in a web, suspended a foot above the front lawn of a brick home.

When the Nassau County police arrived at the scene, they found the plane dangling from the utility cables, nose down, hovering as if freeze-framed a second before tragedy. The pilot and two passengers, mostly unharmed, were sitting on a nearby curb.

The emergency landing, if it can be called a landing, was perhaps not on the scale of the “Miracle on the Hudson,” but it was a miraculous one nonetheless. The plane was intact, as was the house it stopped in front of, according to Detective Vincent Garcia, a Nassau County police spokesman.

The power lines, the police said, had likely kept the incident from turning into a disastrous wreck.

“The wires prevented the plane from actually striking the ground,” the Nassau County police commissioner, Patrick J. Ryder, said on Sunday night.

By Monday morning, the Cessna had been extricated from the power lines, Detective Garcia said. It was sitting in the front yard of a house on Clarendon Drive in Valley Stream, a village of about 37,000 people, two miles northeast of Kennedy Airport in Queens.

The police identified the two passengers as Hongjoo Na, 29, and Jumwoo Jung, 26, and the pilot as Dongil Kim, 27. All three are from the Flushing area of Queens.

The three men had managed to climb out of the plane before emergency workers arrived, Detective Garcia said. Only Mr. Na was injured; he had a sprained finger.

The men, officials said, had been traveling in a plane they had rented from a flight school and aircraft rental service in Farmingdale, N.Y.

A decal on the plane listed the phone number and website for the 2bapilot flight school, owned by Danny Waizman. When reached by phone, Mr. Waizman hung up before answering questions. He did not respond to an email request for comment.

The plane, a single-engine, fixed-wing Cessna with the tail number N5296H, was registered to a corporation owned by Robert Corona, of West Babylon. Mr. Corona did not respond immediately to a message seeking comment.

The trio had flown to Niagara Falls on Sunday, officials said, and they were returning and attempting to land the plane at Republic Airport, in East Farmingdale. But Mr. Kim struggled to land in the fog and missed the runway.

After four failed efforts to land at the regional airport, the plane was directed to Kennedy Airport, where Mr. Kim made two more attempts before running out of fuel, Detective Garcia said.

That is when the plane fell to the ground, clipping the roof of the Revival Outreach Ministries church on Hillside Avenue before finishing its descent in front of a home at 113 Clarendon Drive, officials said.

The Federal Aviation Administration was investigating the crash, it said in a statement. The National Transportation Safety Board also planned to investigate following the F.A.A.’s assessment, a spokesman for the board, Keith Holloway, said.

A preliminary report on the crash’s cause could come as early as the weekend, Mr. Holloway said.

As of Monday, the Nassau County police believed the crash was likely weather-related, Detective Garcia said.

“To make six attempts to land, you know, there had to be a reason why he couldn’t bring the plane down,” he said.

At the time of the crash, the National Weather Service had issued a dense fog advisory for the region surrounding both airports. The Weather Service considers fog dense if visibility falls to one-quarter of a mile or less. In those conditions, it warns people to avoid driving on roads if possible.

The crash also disrupted electricity service in the area, Amy Di Leo, a spokeswoman for the utility PSEG Long Island, said. Around 10:15 p.m., roughly when the plane crashed, about 200 customers were without power. By 8:54 a.m. on Monday, service had been restored.

Ms. Di Leo said she did not believe the plane had pulled down any power lines as it had landed.

Valley Stream’s mayor, Ed Fare, said in a statement on Sunday that “obviously, a plane crash in Valley Stream is always a possibility,” referring to the village’s vicinity to Kennedy, but that Sunday’s close call was “a first” in the 57 years he had lived in the community.

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