CLOSE CALL IN CARP
Pilot badly hurt in front yard crash
When her Old Almonte Road home in Carp was shaken Tuesday morning, Jude Bassett ran outside, expecting to find a car had crashed into the house.
“I didn’t expect an airplane,” she said.
The Bassett home is on a large farm in the city’s rural west end. She said the plane crashed right across the street at the spot where her three children wait for the bus every morning. If the crash had happened minutes later, she said, the outcome could have been totally different.
“I was in the house getting the kids ready for school,” she said. “What if it had happened 15 minutes later?”
Emergency crews were called to 3219 Old Almonte Rd. around 8:30 a.m. after Bassett reported the crash to 911.
The pilot was trapped in the plane and needed help from emergency crews to get out.
Paramedics said the man was in serious condition after a head injury and was stabilized on scene. They moved him to a waiting Ornge helicopter near the 417 and Carp Road.
According to a Transport Canada database of registered personal aircraft, the plane that crashed is registered to Len Connelly of Scarborough and flies out of the Oshawa Executive Airport.
Bassett said family members told her they saw the small plane circling over their farm for a long time before the crash. She said they assumed the pilot had taken off from the nearby Carp airport, which caters to smaller and personal aircraft.
It’s not clear whether the pilot tried to land in one of Bassett’s fields or on Old Almonte Road.
The plane landed hard, listed and rolled onto its side, breaking off a wing and then skidding off the road into a ditch. It clipped a ground wire from a nearby Bell telephone pole, which whipped into Bassett’s home.
Bassett said her husband, other workers from the farm and an offduty firefighter rushed to help the man, who was conscious and talking with people at the scene. They provided towels and placed pressure on the man’s wounds to try to stem the bleeding.
“We’re used to crashes on this corner,” Bassett said. “Cars, not planes.”
The plane was a small Challenger II ultralight aircraft, which can seat two. The small planes — with a 10-metre wingspan and engines capable of 40 to 60 horsepower — are usually used for recreation. They can reach a cruising speed of around 140 km/h.
The plane’s propeller is rearfacing, behind the pilot’s cabin.
Bassett couldn’t say what the pilot was doing in Almonte. However, she said the man appeared to be on a trip as he was travelling with luggage.
Police closed a section of Old Almonte Road for a while as they investigated the crash and crews worked to restore the fallen wire.
We’re used to crashes on this corner. Cars, not planes.