HARD LANDING SENDS TWO PASSENGERS TO HOSPITAL
Neighborhood has experienced previous crashes, some fatal.
WELLINGTON — A man piloting a small aircraft made a hard landing Friday afternoon in the Wellington Aero Club fly-in neighborhood, the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office reported.
The single-engine Cessna went off a runway as it landed and slid into a ditch about 4 p.m. in the 16000 block of Hawker Lane, the sheriff ’s office and the Federal Aviation Administration said. PBSO said the man and a female passenger got out and went to a nearby home. The two were later taken to an area hospital, one by Trauma Hawk helicopter and one by an ambulance, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue said.
Authorities did not identify the two people in the plane or say if they were related. They also did not say if the two lived in the community or from where the flight had started.
The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to investigate the incident.
The development of about 240 homes sits on the village’s western edge near the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. It was designed in the late 1970s and built in the early 1980s. Most homes include huge hangars that allow residents to park their planes after landing on a 4,000-foot runway and taxiing into their backyards.
“We bought because we thought it would be cool to have an airplane in the backyard,” resident Mace Horoff told The Post
in 2007. “We bought because of the plane, but we stay here because of the people.”
But with planes come risks.
Friday’s crash is among several that have taken place in the area over the years.
In 2014, a veteran American Airlines pilot was killed when the experimental plane he was flying crashed into a small lake near the community. In 2012, a pilot was seriously hurt when his plane clipped a tree and crashed during takeoff. In 2007, two people who’d left the neighborhood’s airstrip died when their plane dropped into a nearby park. They were the president of the neighborhood association and his wife. And in 1997, a pilot died when his experimental plane crashed in a neighbor’s yard.