No one was hurt when two small planes collided in mid-air this morning 15 miles southeast of Grand Junction.
“It’s very miraculous,” said Barbara Chappell, an assistant at the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. “There were no injuries.”
A sheriff’s plane carrying four people — including two prisoners — returned safely to the Grand Junction Regional Airport. A plane with two people aboard landed upside down in a field about 14 miles southeast of the airport, said Mike Fergus, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
The sheriff’s plane — a Cesna 210 — landed safely, even though its landing gear was “stuck,” he said. Investigators don’t know how the landing gear became stuck, although it could have been damaged during the collision.
Chappell said weather conditions were good.
Officials haven’t given a cause for the crash.
“That’s exactly what the investigation will determine,” Fergus said.
The National Transportation Safety Board will perform the crash investigation, said Heather Benjamin, spokeswoman for the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department.
The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association quotes federal statistics showing that light aircraft collided 120 times between 1998 and 2007, an average of once a month.
It is unusual that no one is hurt or killed when an accident like this occurs. “These are very, very rare,” Fergus said.
The sheriff’s plane, which is only used for transporting prisoners, was carrying two of them to a Colorado Department of Corrections facility, Chappell said. The plane is flown by a sheriff’s deputy who is also a pilot, Benjamin said.
After the collision, the prisoners were taken back to the Mesa County jail and will later be taken to Cañon City.
“There was no attempt by these prisoners to escape,” Benjamin said.
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported that Del Norte resident Tom Haefeli was flying the second plane, a Cesna 180, which also was carrying his father John.
“All of a sudden, there was a plane right in front of us,” John Haefeli told the paper.
Tom Haefeli turned the nose down, but it was too late. The other plane sheared off a section of the tail, and from then on, he had no control of the plane, he said.
“We thought, ‘We’re not going to make it,’ ” he told the Sentinel.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
