GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARBULLETIN.COM Honolulu firefighters examined the wreckage of a Cessna 150K that crashed in the backyard of a Waialae Iki home yesterday evening. The pilot was treated and released at Queen's Medical Center. His passenger had no injuries.

Crash landing
avoids kids

When his engine stalled, the pilot
tried to land at Waialae Iki Park,
but ended up in a back yard

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By B.J. Reyes and Lisa Asato
breyes@starbulletin.com
lasato@starbulletin.com

The 28-year-old pilot whose single-engine plane stalled 2,000 feet above Koko Head yesterday said he was not thinking about his own safety when he made an emergency landing in a park where children where playing.

"I was more concerned I was going to hurt somebody on the ground and was trying to be as careful as I could," Ryan Pettit said from his home in Kaneohe today.

The Cessna 150K that Pettit was flying was forced to make an emergency landing at Waialae Iki Park, but the plane overshot the park and crashed through a fence into the back yard of a Waialae Iki home yesterday evening, authorities and witnesses said.

No one on the ground was injured, and no homes were damaged.

Pettit and his sole passenger Gerhard "Geo" Olssen were able to climb out of the plane by the time emergency crews arrived, said Honolulu Fire Department spokesman Capt. Richard Soo.

Both were taken to Queen's Medical Center, where Pettit was treated and released. Pettit said Olssen was examined at the hospital and not treated for any injuries.

Recovering from a 3-inch gash to his forehead "that was cut down to the bone," Pettit said today that he was still "a little shaken."

"I was just glad that we didn't hurt anybody I was just happy to be alive and happy nobody else was hurt -- just the plane. Airplanes can be repaired; we have insurance."

Pettit said Olssen was examined at the hospital and not treated for any injuries.

Only after the forced landing did his own mortality sink in, said Pettit, a Hawaiian Airlines sales employee. He said he and Olssen "got out of the plane and hugged each other and (were) just happy that we both made it through."

GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARBULLETIN.COM The tail of the plane, which broke off from the fuselage when the plane hit a mango tree, sat several feet away from the home on Analii Place yesterday evening.

Pettit said about five or six children were playing on the mauka side of the park. When he came down on the left side, the plane landed and bounced three times and was heading straight for a tree.

When he veered right, the left wing clipped the tree, he said, spinning the plane around until "we ended up in somebody's back yard."

Pettit, who has been flying for almost a year, received his pilot's license in August. He credited his training at Oahu Aviation flight school for keeping calm during the ordeal.

"I've done so many practices before with the engine out, I told Geo to be quiet and let me do what I had to do and put the plane down like I was trained."

Capt. Soo said, "It's just a remarkable, remarkable series of events that did not result in a calamity out here."

The Cessna 150K was flying Ewa-bound, headed toward Honolulu Airport when it went down over Waialae Iki Park just before 6 p.m., authorities said.

"The pilot called the tower and reported an engine failure," said Tweet Coleman, the Federal Aviation Administration's Pacific representative. Soo said the flight originated on Lanai.

Witnesses said it appeared that the pilot was trying to land in the park but overshot it to avoid people.

"There were some kids playing soccer out here so he tried to avoid them and he wasn't able to land it on the park, which I believe he was trying to do," said Phillip Govan, who was driving Ewa-bound along Kalanianaole Highway.

Another witness, Laurence Jacobs, said he watched the plane from his home up along the hill at Waialae Iki. "I'm looking out on the lanai and all of a sudden I see this plane coming in over the trees down there. It was fairly high. It was moving and bouncing around."

The plane overshot the end of the park and crashed through a wooden fence separating the park from the residential subdivision. The plane then struck a mango tree in the yard at 4747 Analii Place and spun around to face Koko Head, damaging the wings and clipping the tail from the fuselage.

The residents of the home, an elderly man and his wife, were home but uninjured, Soo said, adding that the woman was hanging laundry on a clothesline as the plane approached. They declined to be interviewed.

The plane was manufactured in 1969 and is registered to Commercial Flying Inc. of Honolulu, according to the FAA's Civil Aviation Registry on the Internet. A man who answered the phone at the company last night said he could not comment on the crash.

Coleman said the pilot and passenger likely would be interviewed by investigators today.

A representative from the FAA's Flight Standards District Office in Honolulu, which is handling the investigation, was at the crash site late last night and the National Transportation Safety Board's office in Los Angeles had been notified, Coleman said.

The plane remained in the yard late last night.

"It looks like it's the best possible scenario for as horrendous an accident as this was," Govan said. "There's a little fence damage and some tree damage, and they're going to have to pick this airplane out of the backyard, but other than that it's miraculous it wasn't worse."