http://registry.faa.gov/N4631J
Phoenix East flight school’s Raul d’Souza is a hero: the young
instructor was piloting a plane late this afternoon, practicing
emergency landings with a student, when the plane ran into engine
troubles–and forced D’Souza, 34, to execute an emergency landing in the
heart of Palm Coast. He did so nearly flawlessly.
With him was Joo Lee, 33, who looked distinctly shaken from the
experience. They both smoked, paced, sat, and smoked again soon after
the landing. They’re both based at Phoenix East Aviation, on Pearl
Harbor Drive in Daytona Beach. D’Souza, who’s been at the flight school
since at least 2004, maintains a YouTube page of favorites that includes several video clips from the flight school.
An SUV–or at least a large white car–had to do an evasive maneuver as
the eastbound plane negotiated the two rather narrow lanes of Palm Coast
Parkway west, and a huge semi, carrying cars, was also on the road; the
plane faintly clipped the truck, but managed to land on the road. The
truck had been parked on the shoulder, having just picked up a Mercedes
from Parkway Self Storage. The plane clipped its left-front guide-pole
with the marker light on its left wing, which shattered, leaving tiny
and still-visible fragments on the fender above the truck’s
left-front-tire. The plane also clipped the air cleaner, which was
dented.
The single-engine Piper, built in 1968, landed safely at 6:45 p.m. on
Palm Coast Parkway, just west of Belle Terre. The plane sat on the road
for less than 20 minutes before authorities and one of the two
occupants of the plane pushed it off the road and parked it at the
entrance of Parkway Self Storage. The wesbound lanes of Palm Coast
Parkway were shut down only briefly.
The plane belongs to Daytona Aircraft Leasing Inc., based at the same
address as the flight school. D’Souza had reported engine trouble to
the Daytona airport’s tower just after 6:30 p.m. Authorities in Flagler
got the call of a plane in distress at 6:37 p.m., when dispatch
announced an airplane emergency, describing a plane approaching Palm
Coast Parkway from the west, toward the east, and possibly looking to
land there. Shortly afterward, the landing took place.
The pilot and his passenger declined to be interviewed, referring
questions to their safety supervisor, who was on his way from Daytona
Beach. The Florida Highway Patrol was investigating the incident, which
it categorized as a crash the moment the plane struck the truck.
Hayden Gordon, 52, has owned the truck since 1999, and said he’d never
had any road incident resembling his experience Wednesday afternoon.
He’s based in Port St. Lucie. He was on his way to New York City, after
starting to pick up cars in Miami. He had three on the truck. “I didn’t
really see it,” Gordon said of the plane’s approach. “I was parked here,
I’d just put the car up, and I was right here, getting ready to chain
it” he said, describing his position to the right of the truck, with the
truck blocking his view of the parkway. “Then I hear the sound, I hear
it go boom. So when I spin around I saw the plane. There was a
car coming. The car went right under. The car went right under it,
yeah?” It was a white car. “And I saw the plane hit the ground and run
out.”
Gordon ran down to see the pilots, who had immediately bailed from
the plane and run to the south shoulder of the road, on the grass. “It
kind of scared me a bit, you know,” Gordon continued, after he’d
realized what had unfolded, but “they were fine,” he said of the plane’s
occupants. “The guy said his engine went out, he tried to start it but
it wouldn’t start.”
For Flagler County, this last plane emergency is only the latest in a series, and one of the more fortunate.
On Jan. 5, a plane carrying three people developed engine trouble on its way back from the Caribbean and crashed into a home on Utica Path
in Palm Coast, killing the pilot and two passengers. The homeowner
survived unscathed. At Wings Over Flagler, the annual air show, in March
2011, stunt pilot Bill Walker was killed when his Yak 52 plane crashed
in front of spectators as he was going through a routine. Two months
later, John Roderick, a 66-year-old retired Air Force lieutenant
colonel, survived a spectacular crash
in the woods of west Flagler when his plane lost power. And in May
2013, Leslie and John Nixon, Ormond Beach residents on their way to
dinner in Georgia, made an emergency landing on the westbound lanes of State Road 100. No one was hurt.
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