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Rocky pilot anxious to learn cause of crash landing

A Rocky Mountain House pilot can hardly wait to find out what went wrong to make his plane engine fail, forcing him to crash land in a field last weekend.
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Barrie Bouwman's Stinson 108 after crashing about 10 km southeast of Rocky Mountain House on Jan 7.

A Rocky Mountain House pilot can hardly wait to find out what went wrong to make his plane engine fail, forcing him to crash land in a field last weekend.

On Jan. 7, Barrie Bouwman, 57, was flying his four-seater Stinson 108 with one passenger when his engine quit about 10 minutes after takeoff.

Rapidly gliding down from about 300 metres, Bouwman had only seconds to decide where to land and aimed for a road until a vehicle appeared. He was forced to manoeuvre the plane over a power line and made a hard landing in the field.

“I don’t know how I did it, but I did,” said Bouwman on Friday.

“It skidded about 200 or 300 feet. I wasn’t going that fast, about 60 to 65 km/h.”

Bouwman and his passenger, both of Rocky, walked away without a bruise, but the plane was damaged.

Flying since 1976, Bouwman said it was definitely his scariest landing.

And he has a word of warning for other pilots.

“Keep practising your engine-out procedures,” he said with a chuckle.

Rocky Mountain House Mayor Fred Nash was practising takeoffs and landings at the Rocky Mountain House Airport shortly before Bouwman made his emergency landing at about 3:45 p.m. in a field about six km west of Hwy 11.

“Mr. Bouwman took off in his airplane and I took off in mine and I flew along beside him for about a minute then I went back to the airport to do my practising.

“I got a distress call saying: ‘Fred, engine out, going down,’ and I flew over to his location and they were outside the airplane. We communicated and I went back to the airport and drove out with my truck just as the police, the ambulance and the fire truck got there.”

Nash said Bouwman is a skilful pilot and did a great job.

“He made an awful lot of decisions in a very short period and nobody was injured.

“If the vehicle wasn’t on the road, he would have most likely landed it incident free.”

The Traffic Transportation Safety Board investigated and deemed the crash non-suspicious. The plane was released back to Bouwman.

A mechanic will be testing the engine today.

Nash said Bouwman is one of 30 or 40 pilots in the area who regularly use Rocky airport and it won’t be long before he’s back behind the controls.

“There’s enough of us around to make sure he doesn’t have roots growing from his toes to the ground. We’ll get him back in the air here.”

Bouwman planned to take a flight on Friday as a passenger.

szielinski@www.reddeeradvocate.com