Plane crashed on to electric fence

Press, 10 April 1987, Page 5

Plane crashed on to electric fence

PA Wellington A pilot, aged 25, who crashed on her first solo cross-country flight last August ended up trapped in wreckage resting on a live electric fence while fuel spilled from a ruptured tank. A schoolboy who pulled the seriously injured pilot from the wreckage near Hamilton Airport could feel the electric fence’s high voltage impulse, according to a Ministry of Transport aircraft accident brief. The boy managed to

pull the pilot from the cockpit and clear of the wreckage. The Grumman aircraft did not catch fire, but was destroyed by the crash. The accident happened when the plane’s engine cut out as the pilot approached Hamilton Airport.

On the approach for a forced landing short of the runway the pilot stalled the aircraft at about 20 feet and it dropped a wing. The right wing tip struck the ground first and the aircraft

cartwheeled, buried the propeller in the ground and came to rest against the electric fence. Investigators found there was no fuel in the left wing tank of the plane, although the fuel selector was switched to the left tank. The right tank contained a “considerable” amount of fuel. There was no fuel in the fuel line to the carburettor and no obvious mechanical reason for the power loss. The air accident report said that because of the tank configuration, it was usual to change tanks at regular intervals in-flight to keep the aircraft balanced laterally. The pilot reported that during the flight she had changed fuel tanks as instructed. Before landing at Matamata, the previous stop on the flight, the direct-reading fuel gauges had indicated about "half full” in each tank. Calculations based on the aircraft’s flight time' and consumption showed the engine stopped after the aircraft had been airborne for the time it would take to use one tankful of fuel, the brief said.