Top Pilot In Flight School Had Over 100 Hours PIC
A pilot and a student
pilot overshot the runway at the Omaka Airfield in New Zealand and
escaped serious injury but damaged their aircraft Friday
morning.
The Cessna 172 came from Feilding and was registered to Air
Manawatu. The wreckage of the plane was removed shortly after the
landing, according to the Marlborough Express.
A St. John Ambulance spokesman said the 22-year-old pilot
suffered minor leg injuries and his 18-year-old passenger suffered
minor head injuries. Air Manawatu officials said the pilot was one
of the airline's top students, with more than 100 hours of flying
experience.
Michael Bryant with Air Manawatu flew to Omaka as soon as he
heard about the crash and took the students home yesterday
afternoon.
Bryant said the students were from India. The pilot had been in
the country for about seven months of a planned 10 month stay,
while the younger man had only been in New Zealand for a month.
They were here specifically to take flying courses, according to
Bryant. Sergeant John Butson of Blenheim police said the Cessna was
landing in a southeasterly direction on the runway. It failed to
come to a stop and clipped a fence between the airfield and the
road.
The plane gained altitude and crashed some 500 feet from the end
of the runway, he said.
Wreckage of the plane was scattered around where it came to
rest. The nose was pointing down and the tail was suspended above a
fence on the edge of a bank overlooking the Taylor River.
Alistair Haigh a member of the Omaka Aero Club raced to the
crash site with fire extinguishers "expecting the worst."
"We all saw it come in down-wind really really quick and low,"
Haigh said. "We saw it might not make it, then it went down and
touched the ground before going up again and clipping the
fence."
Pilot John Evans was about to take off in his homebuilt plane
when he saw the Cessna coming in to make a downwind landing.
Landing down wind instead of into it "makes a lot of difference
to your speed across the ground", Evans said.
"I heard this guy call final approach so I naturally looked out
expecting to see him out there but there was no sign of him," he
said. "He made a mistake obviously and had about 20 knots of wind
up his rear end which doesn't do much for your landing
distance."
Evans radioed the Cessna's pilot to warn him but said the plane
came "whistling past" going "far too fast" with the wind. He then
radioed the airfield's control tower and rushed to the crashed
plane with a first aid kit to find the occupants standing beside
it.
"They were very lucky boys," he said.
New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority communications manager Bill
Sommer said one investigator arrived in Blenheim about an hour
after the accident and another arrived late Saturday afternoon to
inspect the wreckage.
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