Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Pilot hurt in small plane crash
WHITPAIN » A small airplane that had just taken off from Wings Field in Blue Bell crashed in the yard of a home on Meade Road Sunday, but no one on the ground was injured, Whitpain police reported.
The report of the crash in the Broad Axe section of the township came at 5:12 p.m. Sept. 24, police said. Two nearby residents were able to extract the pilot, whose name was not being released, from the airplane and he was airlifted to Penn Presbyterian Hospital, police said.
Police said Monday they did not know the pilot’s condition.
Centre Square Fire Company responded to a report of an airplane crash with the pilot entrapped, Chief Lee Miller said, and found a group of neighbors had “rescued him from the plane.”
Miller said he was told the pilot, a man in his 30s from Maryland, had been suspended by the safety belts in the cockpit and the residents lifted him and cut off a seatbelt that was around his neck, “cutting off his air, and pulled him from the cockpit.”
The plane did not catch on fire, Miller said, adding Centre Square secured the scene.
The incident is being investigated by the Whitpain police, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
The FAA issued a statement identifying the airplane as a Buschmann Vanzetti Vari-Ez experimental aircraft. The plane “crashed approximately one mile from the end of Runway 24 at the Wings Field Airport, Blue Bell,” the statement says.