With this year’s run of fatal commercial plane crashes, including last week’s Air India Boeing 787 disaster, there’s a small comfort in knowing that people are still walking away relatively unscathed from truly absurd general aviation incidents. First responders pulled two people out of a plane that crashed on a hangar’s roof at a small public airport outside Kansas City on Monday. The 73-year-old pilot and his 30-year-old female passenger were taken to a nearby hospital with minor injuries. Thankfully, no one inside the hangar was injured by the plane that dug a huge hole in the structure.
The Beechcraft King Air suffered a “mechanical malfunction” and lost power to its left engine, according to the online crash log of the Kansas Highway Patrol. Yes, the KHP logs recorded the plane crash at New Century AirCenter alongside fender-benders on the interstate. The pilot then lost control of the twin-engine plane while turning left and crashed into the hangar. The mid-manuever impact explained why the aircraft was perched on the roof backwards relative to its direction of impact. The struck hangar belongs to Butler Avionics, an aircraft maintenance and repair company. The pilot might have to get his plane fixed with them to repay the company for its trouble.
The crashed plane leaked fuel into the hangar
The duo in distress didn’t have to wait long before help arrived. Fire District #1 of Johnson County stated that its personnel arrived at the scene within three minutes. The fire crews noted fuel was pouring out of the Beechcraft plane through the roof into the hangar. Firefighters doused the area in foam suppressant as a precaution as they worked to pull the two people from the plane using a ladder. It sounds like it wasn’t any more difficult than retrieving a car stuck in a tree. Believe it or not, the airport remained open during the crash’s investigation on that same Monday afternoon.
In the grand scheme of things, our intrepid pilot could have been worse off if he had attempted to land his King Air on a nearby roadway. Earlier this year, a pilot landed his Beechcraft Bonanza in a Pennsylvania parking lot after suffering a severe mechanical issue. The landing was far from clean as he carved a path of destruction. The plane burst into flames and plowed through a dozen cars. Luckily, only the five people onboard were injured and no one was killed. While a long strip of pavement might look inviting for a troubled aircraft, a single nearby vehicle on the ground could spark a fiery collision.