Freelance journalist and regular LawNews writer Rod Vaughan had a lucky escape on Sunday afternoon after crashing a light plane on the main highway into Thames.
Vaughan says he was preparing to land at Thames airfield when he was hit by sunstrike and momentarily lost sight of a high-voltage power line on the threshold of the runway.
He collided with the power line and crashed 30 metres onto the busy highway below. “Fortunately, I didn’t land on any vehicles and managed to clamber out,” he says. “I am relatively unscathed, apart from damage to my pride.”
It’s the second time that Vaughan, who learned to fly as a teenager, has been involved in a serious light plane crash.
Four years ago, he was flying over Waihi with his son on board when the windscreen of the aircraft exploded. Unbeknown to Vaughan, the windscreen had a hairline crack, causing catastrophic failure in mid-air.
“It was like being in a wind tunnel,” he recalls. “The doors blew off but I managed to set it down in a paddock.”
Sunday’s accident caused a huge traffic jam on the Ngati Maru highway – the major gateway to the Coromandel. Vaughan understands his aircraft also narrowly missed colliding with a motorcyclist.
However, he says this was an accident waiting to happen. For years, the Hauraki Aero Club, of which Vaughan is a member, has been lobbying the Thames-Coromandel District Council to have the high-voltage cables put underground but the council, which owns the airfield, claims it’s too expensive.
“If the lines had snapped [on Sunday] and caused electrical arcing it might have been a totally different story but somehow they remained intact,” Vaughan said. He overheard a councillor at the scene saying she “suppose[d] the council would need to do something now”. She ignored Vaughan’s request to put that in writing.
Will he fly again? Vaughan says he’s reluctant to give it up but in the interests of marital harmony he might need to rethink. His wife Lois was visiting friends in Thames at the time of the accident and has, not surprisingly, “advised me to take up another hobby”.
“When the power suddenly went off and there was a sound of many sirens, they realised there must have been an accident of some description,” he says.
“Minutes later, I managed to send a text message to them to let them know what had happened. We were all pretty shaken up at the time, knowing that it could have been much worse, but God must have been smiling on me for once.”
Vaughan says powerlines have caused a number of fatal light plane and helicopter crashes in New Zealand, including an accident in 1985 when eight people, including four from one family, were killed when their Cessna hit high-tension wires in the Marlborough Sounds.
He says despite the focus on health and safety in this country, “you can still have high-voltage powerlines on the threshold of a runway. Where’s the logic in that?”
Read also: ‘Vale Rod Vaughan’
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