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July 3, 2008

Small plane crashes on takeoff from Middletown airport

MIDDLETOWN -- A small plane crashed in a field after it took off from Newport State Airport this evening, and then exploded, according to witnesses.

A witness also said he saw two men pulling a badly burned man from the plane, who kept repeating, “I’m OK. I’m OK. Get my wife out of there.”

A spokeswoman for the R.I. Airport Corporation, which operates the two-runway airport, confirmed the crash but could not provide details. Firefighters and rescue crews are on site. By about 9:30 p.m., the state medical examiner had also arrived at the scene.

Steve Tibbets, general manager of Landmark Aviation, which manages the airport, said he had no information yet on the crash when reached by phone at about 8:30 p.m.

Pauline Peter, who lives on East Main Road adjacent to the airport, was finishing dinner with her fiancé at around 7:30 p.m. when she noticed a plane flying unusually low out her back window.

“I’ve never seen a plane that low. It was obviously attempting to take off,” said Peter, who has lived next to the airport for the last 20 years.

She estimated that the small white Cessna-style plane was about 50 feet in the air when the wings started to tilt dangerously to one side. She couldn’t tell how many people were on board.

“It went behind a tree, you heard a crash, then an explosion, and then thick black smoke,” Pter said. “From the crash to the explosion was only a couple of seconds.”

The plane landed on the edge of a residential area, Peter said, along Forest Avenue near East Main Road at the south edge of the airport.

“Where it landed –– if it’s not in the residential area, it’s very close to some small houses,” Peter said, noting that the crash site was about a half mile from her home and the street had been blocked off by emergency vehicles.

Local resident Mike Alexander was headed out to get a prescription filled when he noticed smoke coming from the field adjacent to the airport.

“I saw smoke and I thought maybe the kids had set the field on fire for the Fourth of July,” Alexander said. The weather was clear but windy, he said.

But he quickly noticed that the smoke was coming from a plane that had crashed a few hundred yards from the runway. There were two men, who didn’t appear to have been involved in the crash, pulling another man out of the plane.

They got him out, according to Alexander, but he was badly burned. And the injured man was yelling, “I’m OK. I’m OK. Get my wife out of there,” according to Alexander.

The man “was still conscious,” according to Alexander. “His clothes were burned off. He looked to me like he was seriously burned.”

Just after the man was dragged from the wreckage, Alexander said that the plane exploded. “It was low and muffled,” he said, adding that there was a lot of fire.

Soon after the explosion, rescue personnel began to arrive.

Newport State Airport is one of six airports operated by the Rhode Island Airport Corporation. The 221-acre site has two paved runways and is about two miles northeast of the central business district of the city of Newport on Aquidneck Island.

Map: Aerial view of the Newport State Airport and surrounding property.

-- Journal staff writer Steve Peoples, with reports from Journal staff writer G. Wayne Miller

Posted by Andrea Panciera  at 9:37 PM | Permalink

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Derek | July 3, 2008 11:36 PM link

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