Camano pair survive plane crash
Published 11:15 pm Tuesday, July 31, 2007
OLYMPIA – A Camano Island couple walked away with cuts after their vintage airplane crash-landed along Steamboat Island Road on Tuesday afternoon, closing the road and cutting electricity to more than 1,000 homes for hours.
The pilot, Stuart Smith, 65, said the engine of the 1956 De Havilland Chipmunk cut out shortly after takeoff from the Olympia Regional Airport on a return flight to Arlington, about 100 miles to the north, and he was forced to make an emergency landing. He said the plane was about 2,500 feet in the air when the engine trouble began.
He struck several power lines before crash-landing in the front yard of 4545 Steamboat Island Road just before 2:30 p.m.
Smith and his wife, Kit, were treated at the scene and transported by ambulance to Providence St. Peter Hospital as a precaution, said Chuck Hennigan, deputy chief for the Griffin Fire District, which responded.
“Both of them were fine until they tried to bust out of the canopy, and he got a cut on the nose and she got a cut on the hand,” he said. “Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing, they say. They got lucky, very lucky.”
Neighbors extinguished a fire in the engine compartment before firefighters arrived.
