MOHAVE COUNTY, Arizona, Oct. 28, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — The small plane that went down Sunday evening after leaving St. George Regional Airport ended up burned and broken in a rugged and rural part of northern Arizona, but it wasn’t so much a crash as it was a skillful landing under difficult circumstances.
St. George Fire Chief Robert Stoker said the plane’s three occupants would not have walked away nearly unhurt if it weren’t for the skill of the pilot.
“He did a great job,” Stoker told Gephardt Daily.
Witnesses from a subdivision near the site of the downed plane, a few miles south of the St. George Regional Airport, over the Utah-Arizona border, began calling dispatch just after 6 p.m., Stoker said.
“It appears, for some reason, (the plane) couldn’t gain altitude,” he said. “The pilot, I’m not sure if he just lost altitude completely, or if he went to make a landing, but he ended up landing out in the desert. So it was not like a crash that went nose first. It looked like he tried to land the best he could … He kind of landed.”
On impact, “all the landing gear broke off, then they belly slid, at which point the engine area did catch on fire, but once the plane came to a stop, the three occupants were able to exit the plane and ended up having just some minor injuries.”
Responding fire crews could not drive to the rugged scene.
“It was a remote area to where we couldn’t get any apparatus out there, so a lot of the first responders either hiked in or we actually had some private citizens out there that had some off-road vehicles that actually shuttled some of our crews over to the site.”
Once on scene, crews had no resources to douse the fire, but because the flames were not spreading or igniting vegetation, officials decided to let it burn itself out. Had there been serious injuries or a spreading fire, air resources could have been called in, Stoker said.
The plane’s pilot and passengers “were treated at the scene and released. Didn’t require any transport to the hospital.
“The occupants actually walked out, walked back over to the Desert Canyon subdivision,” Stoker said. “They were actually evaluated by Gold Cross Ambulance and our fire department, and then were released.”
Stoker said he was not at the scene, but was told the plane’s occupants were two adults and a juvenile of unknown age. He did not know if they were area residents or travelers just making a short stop at the St. George Regional Airport, he said.
Crews cleared the scene of the downed plane “at about 9 p.m. or so,” Stoker said.
“Really, it was a really very good outcome from what it could have been.”
The ongoing investigation has been handed over to Arizona’s Mohave County Sheriff’s Office.
