Harrison Ford’s vintage open cockpit P-22 plane crashed in a nearby golf course shortly after takeoff from Santa Monica airport.
This isn’t the first time actor Harrison Ford has crashed in a plane, and it may not be the last. The vintage Ryan P-22 World War II training plane he was flying last Thursday went down for a hard landing on a Mar Vista, California golf course last Thursday – hard enough to break the plane apart.
The PenMar Golf Course is next to the Santa Monica Airport, so golfers hear plane after plane taking off and flying overhead, says Jeff Kuprycz, 30, co-owner of A-Frame, an artist management company, who was on the second hole at the time of the crash.
“This plane sounded different. We heard it sputtering and it just went silent, literally right over our heads,” Kuprycz said. Immediately, Kuprycz saw the plane bank left, as if turning back to the airport.
The plane crashed about 900 feet away on the 8th hole.
Ford survived, but with cuts to his head severe enough to require hospitalization. There was some initial alarm regarding his condition, but head wounds always bleed copiously, and often look worse than they are. There was no word on other injuries or what caused the plane to crash. It appeared he was flying solo. Yes, we know, every time he flies, he’s flying solo, but it’s easy to joke when somebody hasn’t died – and in this case he’s not going to.
This isn’t the first time Ford, now 70, has been in a plane crash and survived. He was in a Bell helicopter in 1999 Santa Clara, California that lost power while they were practicing power recovery autorotations. The power didn’t come back up, and the chopper came down hard. He had been with another aviation professional, and neither man was hurt.
The National Transportation Safety Board said an investigator would be sent.
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