Monday 4 April 2011

Two injured as small plane makes forced landing on Weston Canal Road in Franklin

A single-engine airplane made a forced landing on Weston Canal Road in Franklin just before 1 p.m. Saturday, and the two people on board were hospitalized with injuries, police said.

The plane, which damaged utility lines, caused power outages and diverted traffic for hours, came to rest across Weston Canal Road near School House Road.

The tail of the plane partly cracked off the fuselage. Joel Kipman, chief of the Elizabeth Avenue Fire Company, said the first firefighters on the scene extinguished a small fire in the plane.

Both occupants were taken to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick with "nonlife-threatening injuries," Franklin police Lt. Kenneth Williams confirmed.

Officials were investigating late Saturday afternoon what caused the forced landing, and were trying to determine where the plane took off and where it intended to land, said Jim Peters, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration in New York. It was a clear day with unrestricted visibility, Peters said.

The plane, a 1979 Piper PA-38 Tomahawk, a singe-engine, front-propeller airplane, is registered to a New York City man named Thomas K. Dempsey. Officials did not identify the people on the plane, or say whether Dempsey was on board.

Township resident Mark Tomlin was in a field adjacent to the accident site when the plane landed. He did not hear a plane engine and assumed a big truck with a heavy load crashed at the intersection, he said.

"I didn't hear a thing until "Bang,' " Tomlin said.


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