Two injured in Dexter plane crash
By Nick Sambides Jr.
BDN Staff
DEXTER, Maine — One person suffered head injuries when a small airplane practicing takeoffs crashed in a backyard near Dexter Regional Airport on Saturday, officials said.
The unidentified man was taken to Mayo Regional Hospital by ambulance. The woman, who apparently was piloting the Beechcraft 150, walked away from the crash, Dexter Fire Chief Matt Connor said.
Photo coutesy of Mike Jones
CRASH – A Beechcraft 150 lies overturned after crashing in a backyard near Dexter Regional Airport on Saturday, Aug. 29, 2015.
“They took off, and it was still up here, no wind. And evidently they didn’t lift off in time and just couldn’t get enough airspeed to clear the trees,” Airport Manager Roger Nelson said Saturday. “They did veer from the airport itself, trying to find a spot where there were less trees to get through.”
The single-engine plane crashed through bushes before coming to rest about 500 feet from an Airport Road house and mobile home at about 8:45 a.m., Connor said.
One witness reported the plane flying very low, directly over the mobile home before it came down.
“It’s a miracle [man] is alive. The cockpit is pretty destroyed. The passenger side is pretty well crushed,” said 55-year-old Mike Jones of Hudson, a pilot who was working on his aircraft at the airport when he heard the crash and rushed to the scene.
The plane already had practiced one touch-and-go landing. In its second run, it landed on the airport’s 3,000-foot paved runway and turned onto the shorter grass runway to try to get into the wind and took off again, Nelson said.
“The woman in the trailer that they went right over appeared to be on full power,” Nelson said. “They clipped a bunch of hedges and nosed in head first” before the plane flipped over.
Firefighters and Maine Department of Environmental Protection workers were at the scene waiting for Federal Aviation Administration officials to approve their removing the destroyed plane and about 20 gallons of spilled aviation fuel.