Plane comes down short of runway near Hurricane Airport

A single-end one plane made a soft landing short of the Hurricane Municipal Airport runway, Hurricane, Utah, Sept. 3, 2021 | Photo courtesy of Hurricane City Police Department, St. George News

ST. GEORGE — A single-propeller private plane landed short of the Hurricane Municipal Airport runway without its landing gear down Friday just before noon, sliding onto the brush 50 yards to the east of 1100 West.

Stock photo used for illustrative purposes only of a Bellanca 17-30A Super Viking plane | Photo courtesy of FlightAware, St. George News

Police said it was human error that cause the plane, a 1975 Bellanca 17-30A Super Viking, to go down.

“To the best of my knowledge, the pilot came in to land and forgot to put the landing gear down,” Hurricane Police Officer Dan Radditz said. “He tried to take off again but wasn’t able to.”

At first, police said an onlooker calling 911 thought they were seeing a dramatic plane crash with potentially fatal consequences, but it proved to live up to the Chuck Yeager quote, “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing.”

“(The) person who reported it was several miles away and thought it was a lot worse than it was,” Radditz said, adding that he was almost reluctant to call the incident a “crash.” No one was injured, he said, and the only damage to the plane was a bent propeller and knocked-off landing gear.

When authorities came on the scene, the pilot, a 70-year-old male from Colorado, was standing next to the plane. He was cleared after being checked out medically

“Technically we have to qualify it as a crash, but the pilot walked away from the plane uninjured,” Radditz said.

This report is based on information provided by law enforcement and may not contain the full scope of findings. 

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2021, all rights reserved.

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