Experienced pilot loses power, flips plane, walks away

PALMER — A 67-year-old longtime pilot walked away unharmed after crashing his small plane in a bog a few hundred yards from the nearest home off Caribou and Charley streets Tuesday afternoon.

Joe Pendergrass lost power to his Piper PA-12 bush plane around 3:15 p.m. as he was flying over homes north of Bogard Road during some recreational flying.

The 38-year Valley resident was piloting a red-and-white single-wing aircraft, which he has owned for about three years and which reportedly had plenty of gas in both tanks when it began sputtering, said Pendergrass, a private pilot since 1969.

“I kept switching from tank to tank and pumping the gas and it picked up a little and then it just died. I tried to make it to the airstrip about one-half mile away, but couldn’t make it,” he said, wiping some blood from a small abrasion on his nose. “So I glided it, it seemed like for a long time, as I looked for a place to land it. I was trying to land it as safely as I could and I thought I had it until the wheels sunk into the swamp and it flipped over.”

David Arthur, an Anchorage firefighter who lives on Caribou St., heard the plane sputtering over his roof and knew something wasn’t right. As he stood at his kitchen window, he saw the plane go down on the other side of the stand of trees in wetlands behind his 11-year-old home.

Arthur was one of a half-dozen people living on the edge of the wetlands who ran to the scene to make sure no one was hurt.

“Even though I’ve responded to accidents many times before, I guess you never get used to something like this happening so close to home,” Arthur said.

His wife Deanna was picking up their 11-year-old son, Luke, from Cottonwood Creek Elementary when she heard about the crash.

“He told me not to panic,” she said, swatting a swarm of mosquitoes that had followed her husband and Pendergrass up from the swamp. “I heard the sirens from the school and figured it was a car accident. So I called my mom because she lives up the road and I figured she would be worried, but she didn’t even hear anything.”

When she arrived to the house with their wide-eyed son, she told Pendergrass she was glad he was OK.

“That’s a scary thing,” she said.

Turns out she already knew the Pendergrass family. She said she went to high school with their relatives.

“It’s a small world,” she said.

Pendergrass said he has had close calls in other planes and that he doubts the plane is salvageable after flipping on its wings and becoming soaked in the swamp.

Alaska State Trooper Scott Bjork said after talking to the National Transportation Safety Board that Pendergrass could grab his personal items from the plane and make plans to get the wreckage moved after he took several photos for the investigation.

Bjork borrowed a pair of rubber boots from Arthur so he could wade into the bog as Pendergrass headed home to pick up his own boots.

As Luke led the way down a 60-foot hill and through the woods to the site hidden from his house, he said he was a little surprised when he heard about the crash.

“It doesn’t happen every day,” the 11-year-old said with a maturity beyond his years, adding, “but maybe if you’re not crashing, you’re not flying.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.