Pilot Bails Out Before Crash in Ramona

A pilot parachuted to safety Thursday after his single-engine airplane lost power and crashed into the backyard of a Ramona home.

The pilot, William Allen Norton, 43, of Mesa, Ariz., suffered a cut chin and was treated at the scene by paramedics, said Capt. Jack McKee of the Ramona Fire Department.

No one on the ground was injured and there was no damage to the property where the plane crashed, said Lt. David Bliss, commander of the sheriff’s substation in Ramona.

Norton’s plane, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, was destroyed when it crashed shortly before 11 a.m., Bliss said. The plane was at about 6,000 feet when Norton bailed out.

“He got out of the plane safely,” Bliss said. “He had a laceration of some type around his mouth, but he was walking, talking and moving around.”

Norton, a test pilot and owner of Intercoastal Flight Research Inc. in Mesa, took off from Ramona Airport on a test flight, Bliss said. The plane crashed behind the home of Vickie Nielson on Magnolia Street near California 78. Nielson said she was in her kitchen when she heard the crash.

“It landed in an area where a creek runs through a corner of our property,” Nielson said. “The plane was in some sort of Frisbee-type spin and it dropped directly down.”

“I saw dust coming up and I thought a car had gone off the road into the creek bed,” she said. “I couldn’t see the plane at all. I thought it was odd that the fence hadn’t gotten shaken out or anything. It didn’t even bend a weed. Once it hit, it hit like a dropped rock.”

Norton told Nielson he was conducting tests of weight distribution for the plane’s owner, John E. Rapillo of Santa Ana. The plane was at about 13,000 feet when it lost power and went into a spin, Norton told Nielson.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.

The value of the plane was not available.