Woman, 68, crash lands plane with no landing gear after pilot, 79, falls ill
A 68-year-old woman flying on a small airplane took the controls and crash landed without any landing gear on an island after the pilot suffered a medical emergency, police said.
The crash happened on Saturday afternoon near Martha's Vineyard Airport in West Tisbury, Massachusetts. The 79-year-old male pilot suffered the emergency during the plane's final approach, Massachusetts State Police said.
State police said the crash "resulted in a hard landing outside the runway that caused the aircraft's left wing to break in half."
Local police said the plane landed on its belly with no landing gear and said the pilot had to be extricated from the plane.
Martha's Vineyard Airport (MediaNews Group via Getty Images)The pilot was then flown to a Boston hospital in life-threatening condition. The woman was uninjured and released from a local hospital, police said.
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West Tisbury police said the airport had opened the short runway and was slowly continuing operations Saturday. State police said later in the day that the scene had been cleared.
The aircraft, a 2006 Piper Meridian, was moved to a secure location at the airport, state police said. It had departed from Westchester, New York, earlier Saturday.
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation and is being assisted by Massachusetts State Police and the FAA.
The FAA said it will post a preliminary accident/incident report usually by the next business day. No other information was immediately available.
The crash happened almost 24 years to the day after a Piper crash killed John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren Bessette off Martha's Vineyard.
That plane crashed off the Massachusetts coast because the late U.S. president's son was experiencing spatial disorientation — confusion about the plane's position while descending over water at night.
The deaths were the latest in a long history of tragedies affecting the Kennedy family which have become known as the "curse of the Kennedys."
The safety board stated the probable cause as "the pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the accident were haze and the dark night."
The report quotes tests which show that even an instrument-qualified pilot who loses a visual reference of the earth's surface can take as long as 35 seconds to establish full instrument control.
Spatial disorientation was regularly among the top causes of fatal air accidents, the report said.
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