PLYMOUTH — The pilot of a motorized parachute escaped serious injury after his aircraft crashed Thursday morning into the west bank of the Pemigewasset River.
The pilot, who declined to speak about the incident as he and employees of a local towing company worked to haul the aircraft up the river bank and onto an awaiting flatbed truck, seemingly ran into trouble just before 8:30 a.m., according to Jason Randall, the superintendent of the Plymouth Village Water and Sewer District.
Randall said minutes later he got a call from an employee at the district’s wastewater treatment plant on South Street telling him he needed to come there immediately because “there’s a plane down on the bank.”
The plane, said Randall, “looked like a go-cart with a parachute,” and its male, middle-aged pilot appeared unhurt except for some abrasions.
Randall said that the district owns 40 acres of land along the west bank of the Pemigewasset, of which the wastewater treatment plant occupies 10. The crash site was in the middle center of the property, said Randall, and some 100 feet from an agitator at the treatment plant.
Running to the crash site with the employee, the men confirmed that the pilot was not injured, said Randall, who then called 9-1-1. Emergency responders from several agencies arrived shortly thereafter to further check on the pilot and to secure the aircraft after which the pilot made arrangements to recover the aircraft privately.
The crash, which will likely be investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, did not impact the operation of the wastewater treatment plant, said Randall.
But, he added, the crash had people there talking about it and how close the pilot and the plant were to a truly bad outcome had the aircraft crashed into either the agitator or wastewater tanks near it.
Randall said the employee who called him about the crash had been doing a regular, daily inspection of the wastewater plant when “he heard the aircraft coming in low and the engine cut out and start again,” after which the plane went down into the brushy, steep bank below the plant.
The aircraft, which Plymouth firefighter Stan Graton said had taken off from the nearby Plymouth Municipal Airport, was travelling north up the river, according to Randall, and before crashing it successfully avoided a power line that was stretched over the river.
In speaking with the pilot, Randall said he got the sense that the man was “more frustrated than anything because the crash happened on a beautiful day” for flying.
“We’re lucky that he didn’t land in a piece of equipment or tankage,” said Randall, while another relief was that the crash was accidental, rather than deliberate, adding that “in this day and age, you don’t know what’s going to happen” when something unusual occurs at a municipal facility.
Graton, who was present to assist with the recovery of the aircraft, said motorized parachutes are popular in the community.
“There’s a lot of them,” about a dozen that fly out of the Plymouth Municipal Airport, he said.