DIAMOND POINT — Two pilots and a passenger walked away unscathed late Tuesday after a private plane crash-landed short of the runway, then collided with another plane waiting to take off.
Witness accounts of the collision at the east end of Diamond Point Airport shortly after 4 p.m. said a Piper Cherokee 180 flown by Dennis Rech of Olympia came in too low.
The Piper’s landing gear struck a berm between the east end of the runway and Diamond Point Road.
Rech’s aircraft spun and struck the right wing of a Cessna 150 piloted by Theodore Calderone, who was waiting at the end of the runway with passenger Ernie Hanson to take off.
Both Calderone and Hanson are Diamond Point residents.
Rech’s plane landed, and part of its landing gear collapsed, rupturing the fuel tanks in the wing, and made a 180-degree slide landing on the paved runway.
“He essentially came in on top of them, and he got spun around,” said Mary Dee Countryman, a volunteer firefighter with the Diamond Point Fire Station for Clallam County Fire District 3.
The fire station crew based near the airport was first on the scene to spray the 30 gallons of fuel that spilled from the wreckage with fire-retardant foam.
Countryman said the plane flown by Calderone was making its turn to take off “and they got nailed from the sky.”
Divots were found in the grassy berm where Rech’s landing gear first made contact before it bounced and crashed.
“Five seconds sooner and he would have went right through me, or his wheels would have hit me,” said Diamond Point resident Dan Barrett.
Barrett was driving his pickup truck up the incline of Diamond Point Road a few yards from the end of the runway when the Piper Cherokee suddenly streaked overhead.
Countryman said the fire district and a Clallam County Sheriff’s Office deputy based in Blyn reported the crash to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The FAA is expected to call in investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board to look into the crash.
Diamond Point Airport is a private facility near the northeast tip of Miller Peninsula in far East Clallam County, overlooking Discovery Bay and near the Jefferson County line.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
