The Sunnyvale Sun

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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Walked Away: Tom Boyer looks over a damaged Piper Warrior, which he crash-landed in a marsh near the Palo Alto Airport on April 23 after the planeÕs single engine shut down.

Sunnyvale pilot survives crash landing

By Stephen Baxter

A typical morning flight for Sunnyvale pilot Tom Boyer nearly turned deadly April 23 when the engine on his small plane quit and forced him to land in a marsh.

Boyer walked away from the crash with a scrape on his elbow and a bruised forehead, and was unfazed by the accident. He said he was trained to handle engine failure and he didn't panic.

"For the most part everyone's saying I did the right thing--I followed the training," Boyer said.

Boyer, a 64-year-old Hewlett-Packard Co. retiree and consultant, has been flying small planes for about five years. He also served in the U.S. Navy as a crewman on planes in Vietnam.

At about 9:30 a.m., Boyer departed Palo Alto Airport in a single-engine Piper Warrior borrowed from the Shoreline Flying Club. He planned to go up and practice landings until noon. Everything seemed fine at his initial takeoff.

"I was just heading straight out to fly to the Dumbarton Bridge to take a left turn. As soon as I got to 300 or 400 feet, the engine quit. I thought, 'This shouldn't happen,' " Boyer said.

"Then I tried giving it some more gas. ... The first thing they tell you to do is to fly the airplane, don't mess with the switches," said Boyer. "I tried to give it some gas, and it started, then it stopped. I switched [gas] tanks from left to right, but that didn't work either."

The second time the engine quit, the comforting buzz of the propeller fell silent.

"I didn't panic. ... I knew what to do and I was confident to be able to do it," he said.

Pilots say a common misconception is that small planes sink like stones when their engines fail. Normally, a skilled pilot can glide a powerless plane under control.

Without the engine, Boyer gripped the control wheel and saw he was a few hundred feet above a marsh near San Francisquito Creek at Baylands Nature Preserve. He knew he needed to avoid some power lines, and he looked for a hard place to land to deploy the landing gear. Still diving, he found none, and within 30 seconds he landed the plane on its belly in the muddy marsh.

"I just landed it. ... I turned off the stuff in the plane and I got out. There was no fuel leaking and there was no fire," Boyer said.

Menlo Park firefighters, dispatched from Station 2 at 2290 University Ave. in East Palo Alto, could see the downed plane in less than two minutes. Wearing wading gear, they crossed the muddy marsh and were surprised to find Boyer alert.

Harold Schapelhouman, chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, said Boyer was the first pilot he had seen in 25 years walk away from a plane crash.

"He's a very lucky man," Schapelhouman said of Boyer. "Outside of the damage to the aircraft, he walked away from that really no worse from the experience. That's not normal."

Around Christmas 2004, six people died in a small plane crash near the airport. Another small plane crash-landed in San Francisquito Creek and the pilot drowned, Schapelhouman said.

Boyer said he nicked his arm and forehead.

"It was just a bruise. I think that the owner put in a new set of sun visors on the plane, so that's not bad," he says.

A few minutes after the landing, Menlo Park authorities responded to the fatal car crash of author David Halberstam, also near the Dumbarton Bridge.

National Transportation Safety Board officials in a helicopter plucked the downed plane from the marsh on April 26, and the Federal Aviation Administration is looking into the crash. On May 2, the plane remained at the Palo Alto Airport with a bent wing and mangled landing gear.

Boyer plans to continue flying. He says he is more scared driving his family's minivan on South Bay freeways than he is in the air, especially merging from Highway 85 to Interstate 280.

Boyer said a big part of pilot training is using good judgment. He said, "That's what I have to do--concentrate on making good judgments."