Plane Crashes Into Vehicle; No One Hurt

Carl Partch, driving peacefully along Roscoe Boulevard on Thursday night, didn’t know what hit him.

And when he saw what it was, he didn’t want to believe it.

“Who would think that when you’re driving down the road minding your own business that a plane is going to come out of the air and hit you?” said the shaken 29-year-old, standing outside his badly dented 1992 Ford Explorer.

But that is exactly what happened Thursday night as Partch drove down Roscoe near Van Nuys Airport on his way to an economics class.

No one was injured in the bizarre accident, but there were shaky nerves all around.

“Wow, this is too much,” said Ray Sanchez, one of dozens of people caught in the traffic jam on Roscoe Boulevard. “This could have been much worse. It makes me nervous just to think about what could have happened here.”

About 7 p.m., the plane, a single-engine Cessna 150, was flying southbound, approaching a landing strip at the airport when witnesses said they heard the engine sputter.

The pilot, apparently realizing she wasn’t going to make the runway, touched down in a vacant field about one-quarter mile north of the airport, said Rick Lewis, 17, of North Hills.

“I knew something was wrong when I heard the engine and saw that she was coming in the opposite way of the flight pattern,” said the high school student who was sitting on his bike at the corner of Roscoe Boulevard and Hayvenhurst Avenue when the crash occurred.

“After she landed, she couldn’t stop, and dragged a piece of chain-link fence with her, which slowed her down like an aircraft carrier cable slows down jets,” said Lewis, an avowed airplane buff.

But the plane kept going, barreling onto Roscoe, where it surprised Partch, who was traveling about 40 m.p.h.

“When it hit, I kind of spun out and the car just stopped,” Partch said. “When I looked up and saw that it was an airplane, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a movie. Then I remembered there might be a fire, so I got out of there.”

Authorities declined to identify the pilot, a woman in her 30s. She was uninjured but shaken after the accident.

“She’s not badly hurt, just hyperventilating,” said a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic standing outside the ambulance where the pilot sat after the premature landing. “But she is all shook up. She doesn’t know what happened.”

“She was crying,” said Rosie Jett, who stopped to comfort the pilot. “She was saying that she didn’t think she was going to see her son and husband again.”

Meanwhile, Partch surveyed the damage, still trying to grasp what had happened.

“An airplane hitting my car. Why my car? She must have insurance, right?”