Crash

Last Wednesday, July 1, I witnessed an airplane crash. It was something I never really wanted to see, but its always good to learn from others' mistakes so you don't make the same ones. The flight started out normally, we went to the Provo airport and worked on IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). The flight at Provo was uneventful. As we flew back to Spanish Fork, our home base, and entered the traffic pattern, we heard several radio calls indicating other traffic around the airport. There were two airplanes in the pattern with us, one of which was paralleling us on the opposite side of the airport. We reached the Base leg (where an aircraft makes a 90 degree turn from the course parallel the runway prior to lining up with the runway for landing) at the same time and were approaching nearly head on. I radioed the other pilot and told him that we would make our approach to the taxi way, leaving the runway for him, and allowing us both to land parallel one another.



I came to a hover over the taxi way (on the left) just before he made his first mistake. As we began our taxi back to the ramp, the airplane came in and made an extremely hard landing. He bounced about five feet into the air and pitched up nearly dragging his tail on the runway. Then he yawed crazily to the left and set down partially sideways. He swerved a bit, then straightened out and took off again. I was thinking that if I had done something like that, I would've hit the brakes and taken a little breather. This guy went around the pattern again and came in as we set down on the ramp ( at the bottom left of the picture by the hangars) . We saw him come down, make a bounce, then bank hard left and disappear behind the hangars. After that, we saw people running and a guy driving quickly down the taxi way (right where we just were). We shut down and then headed over for a look. The plane was off the taxi way and nearly to the parallel road. If he hadn't recovered that first time, it is likely that he would've hit us and there would've been a lot more trouble. It was a sobering experience which gave me the jitters for a while, but it was also a good learning experience.