TOP STORY: Children flee as aircraft hits Mount beach

By Beck Vass
Two children ran for their lives as a microlight plane crash-landed and flipped upside down just metres from where they were playing on a Mount Maunganui beach.
The children's mother Wiki Kahika told them to get ready to run as the microlight wobbled in the sky before hitting the sand at the beach off Concord Ave about 1.15pm yesterday.
Ms Kahika told the Bay of Plenty Times she was sunbathing as her two children Brody and Raine Cooper, aged 11 and 8, were digging in the sand when the chaos erupted.
"We just saw a plane sort of going a bit wonky in the sky with the tail going from side to side up by the Mount and sort of coming closer and closer.
"It was just getting closer and as it started approaching it was getting lower in the sky and I just asked the kids to get ready to run."
Ms Kahika said her son ran one way but the plane followed, so he ran the other way to avoid it.
"It crashed down and flipped over about 30m from where we were."
The pilot of the two-seater Bantam B22S, Tauranga man John Burns, 69, was uninjured.
Ms Kahika, her children, and a couple who had been walking along the beach, came to Mr Burns' rescue as he was stuck, trapped in the plane harness upside down with petrol running down his head.
The group gathered some papers from inside the plane and let Mr Burns "catch his breath" before flipping the microlight back over, she said.
"It was fairly lightweight."
She said she sat watching her children playing in the sand and looking back at the plane, which was having obvious problems, before glancing back at her children.
"I did mention to the kids that it looked like a person did not know how to fly, so it looked like they were going to crash.
"[I thought] 'Hang on that's getting closer to us'. I noticed that the engine wasn't going. It just glided in the wind coming towards us. It did look like it was a bit out of control or maybe a learner driver.
"We were quite surprised that it was landing on us," she said.
"It pretty much just came down. I think it probably travelled like 2m or 1m and the propeller just went into the sand and it just flipped over.
"From the time that we saw it by the Mount to the time that it got to us it would have been about 40 seconds to a minute.
"I wasn't scared because it's a pretty wide beach."
Firefighters and police from Tauranga and Mount Maunganui were at the scene, along with St John Ambulance officers but the investigation is now in the hands of the Civil Aviation Authority.
Mr Burns was fine after the landing but was advised to seek medical treatment because he could be sore after adrenaline wore off.
Mr Burns today told the BayTimes the crash had not deterred him from flying and that he would be back in the air at the next opportunity.
"Oh yes. That's what they used to do in the war - straight back up," he said.
Mr Burns has been flying microlights since 1993 and although he had never crashed, he had experienced an engine failure before.
The microlight belonged to the Bay of Plenty Microlight Association and Mr Burns had hired it for the day.
He flew to Waihi Beach where he picked up a friend who he took to Pauanui on the Coromandel Peninsula. He had just dropped his friend off at Waihi Beach and was coming back in to land when the engine lost power.
Staff in the Tauranga Airport control tower had a stressful five minutes as they waited to find out what happened to the plane they were expecting but had not arrived after they watched it drop below trees.
Chief supervisor of the Tauranga Airport control tower Michele Dumble said staff in the tower had been talking to the pilot before the landing and were expecting him to arrive.
Mrs Dumble said staff were not aware of an emergency situation or that the pilot had engine problems but when the plane did not arrive shortly after the tower last had contact with him, they became concerned. It was procedure for staff to physically look for planes landing to see the order in which they would arrive.
"We started looking for him and saw him dropping down below the level of the trees. We saw him disappear below the trees."
Because radio transmission worked on a "line of sight" basis, the plane was too low for the tower to continue talking to the pilot, Mrs Dumble said.
As staff became worried wondering where the pilot was, a pilot from a Saab arriving from Wellington told them he would keep a lookout and reported back to the tower when he saw the plane on the sdands of the beach.
"He could see that the guy had landed on the beach and the aircraft had flipped upside down."
The control tower began its emergency process which saw emergency services alerted.
Tauranga Airport manager Ray Dumble said the airport was the fourth busiest in the country and this was the first time he recalled such an incident occurring.
The plane was now in a hangar at the airport.
- Additional reporting by Joel Ford