Harrison Ford crash-landed his vintage plane Thursday after losing engine power, suffering serious but not life-threatening injuries after using his extensive piloting skills to "beautifully" bring down the plane on a golf course and avoid nearby homes.
It was the latest and most serious in a series of crashes and close calls for the 72-year-old action-adventure A-lister, who like his "Star Wars" alter-ego Han Solo has a taste for aerial thrills. He was helped by golfers who saw the plane come down about a quarter-mile short of the runway at Santa Monica Municipal Airport and taken to a hospital conscious and breathing.
Officials work on the scene of a vintage airplane crash-landed by Harrison Ford on the Penmar Golf Course in the Venice area of Los Angeles, March 5, 2015. (AP-Yonhap)
Fire officials would not confirm the pilot's identity. However, an email from interim Santa Monica city manager Elaine Polachek sent to city officials said the plane was flown by Ford.
According to the email, Ford was about a half-mile west of the airport and flying at 914 meters when he told air traffic controllers that his engine failed. Ford's plane "apparently hit a tree on the way down," and in addition to a cut forehead Ford may have broken his leg, the email said.
The plane, a yellow 1942 Ryan Aeronautical ST3KR with stars on its wings, was upright and mostly intact after the crash. No one on the ground was hurt.
"I would say that this is an absolutely beautifully executed -- what we would call -- a forced or emergency landing, by an unbelievably well-trained pilot," said Christian Fry of the Santa Monica Airport Association.
The airport's single runway sits amid residential neighborhoods in the city of more than 90,000 on the Pacific Ocean. City leaders and many residents advocate closing the airport, citing noise and safety concerns. Other airplanes taking off or landing there have crashed into homes, and in September 2013 four people died when their small jet veered into a hangar and caught fire.
Ford, who keeps his plane at the airport, took off at 2 p.m. About 20 minutes later, he told the tower he had "engine failure" and was making an "immediate return," according to a recording posted by the website LiveATC.net.
He came down on a fairway of Penmar golf course.
"Immediately you could see the engine started to sputter and just cut out, and he banked sharply to the left," said Jeff Kuprycz, who was golfing when he saw the plane taking off. "He ended up crashing around the eighth hole."
Kuprycz estimated the plane was about 61 meters overhead when it plunged to the ground.
"There was no explosion or anything. It just sounded like a car hitting the ground or a tree or something. Like that one little bang, and that was it," Kuprycz said.
Charlie Thomson, a flight instructor at the airport who saw Ford take off, said engine failure like Ford's does not make the plane harder to maneuver. "It just means you have to go down," he said.
Ford is cast to play the swashbuckling Solo in his fourth "Star Wars" movie, set for release in December. The original "Star Wars" in 1977 made Ford an overnight star who later played whip-slinging archaeologist Indiana Jones in four hugely popular movies.
Shooting on "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" was shut down for several weeks last July after Ford broke his leg during filming at the Pinewood Studios outside London. The accident involved the spacecraft door of the Millennium Falcon, which makes a return in the highly anticipated film.
Ford got his pilot's license in the late 1980s and has made headlines with his flying before, though he had never been significantly injured doing it. In 2001, he rescued a missing Boy Scout with his helicopter. Nearly a year before, he rescued an ailing mountain climber in Jackson, Wyoming.
In 2000 in Lincoln, Nebraska, a gust of wind sent a six-seat plane Ford was piloting off the runway. He and his passenger were not injured.
He has also volunteered his services during forest-fire season, when rescue helicopters are busy fighting blazes. (AP)