Light Airplane Crash-Lands in a Tight Situation

A small private plane having difficulty landing Monday at the Fullerton County Municipal Airport clipped the top of a chain-link fence and crashed into a railroad embankment, but the pilot and a passenger walked away with superficial injuries.

“The plane crashed,” said the pilot, Steven R. Johnson, 33, of Anaheim, who appeared to be shaken up. “It crashed because of a loss of power.”

Douglas Kennedy, the first Fullerton police officer on the scene, said the single-engine, four-seat aircraft made its approach too fast, touched down and then attempted to lift off again at the end of the runway. The Cessna Cardinal 177, which was on a flight from Long Beach, narrowly wedged itself be tween a set of Santa Fe Railroad communication wires and an enclosed airport runway light marked, “Danger: High Voltage.”

The passenger, Albert Allen, 43, of Yorba Linda, said that the plane “started porpoising,” meaning that the aircraft bounced off the runway on impact instead of landing. After the plane bounced, he said, “we got airborne and then lost power.”

As Federal Aviation Administration investigators inspected the scene, a private flight instructor at the airport observed that she couldn’t imagine how the pilot managed to fit the plane between the embankment and the runway light and do so little damage to the aircraft or the people inside.

“He’s lucky he walked away,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. “It doesn’t look like a physical possibility.”