Engine failure forces emergency landing.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Two Lane County drug enforcement officers on their way to Fresno, Calif., to fetch a suspect Wednesday escaped injury when the private plane they rode in made an emergency landing in a field southeast of Creswell.

About 30 seconds after the Cessna Caravan's takeoff from the Creswell Airport, as the turboprop plane climbed in the sky, its single engine quit.

Pilot Brian Marquart set the plane down in an open field but couldn't stop the plane from breaking through a wire fence and plowing into the first tree rows of an adjacent filbert orchard. The muddy skid marks stretched as far as 1,500 feet.

Sgt. Lee Thoming, supervisor of the Lane County Interagency Narcotics Enforcement Team, would not identify the officers in the plane. Members of the team come from police agencies across the county and work undercover.

He said hiring a plane ride from Wright Brothers Skydiving of Eugene was cheaper than asking the officers to spend two days on the road transporting the suspect. He said they're booked on a commercial flight today.

"We'll hope they have better luck," Thoming said.

Besides the pilot and two officers, plane owner Dave Wright was also aboard when the plane went down about 11:45 a.m. He had nothing but praise for the pilot.

"When the engine quit, he landed the plane with minimal damage and we're all here," he said.

With his lunch in a plastic grocery sack on his arm, he jumped into the passenger side of a pickup truck to leave the scene. Was it a close call? somebody asked.

"Naw," he said as the truck drove away.

Lane County sheriff's Deputy Ed Lagrone, who was part of the crew guarding the scene until investigators arrived, said, "It was basically a landing more than a crash."

The nose was dented and a wing was torn, but the Cessna appeared salvageable. The plane, manufactured in 1988, was the cream of the Wright Brothers' four-plane fleet.

The Eugene-based company was in the news in January, when a 57-year-old veteran skydiver apparently had a heart attack and died while in the air. So Wednesday's emergency landing brought a second Federal Aviation Administration investigation to the firm this year.

The owners of Wright Brothers Skydiving had never had a fatality in their 15 years at the Creswell Airport, said Wright, who has performed more than 4,000 jumps and only needed emergency parachute canopies on three of them.

The out-of-place plane and commotion of emergency vehicles drew a crowd of onlookers to the filbert field, including an aviation mechanic, a recently retired United Airlines pilot and a general aviation pilot - all of whom spoke admiringly of the pilot's skill.

Engine failure that soon in flight doesn't leave a pilot very many choices about where to set a plane down, and Marquart milked the most space out of the rectangular field by approaching it diagonally, the pilots said.

He used a technique to minimize the drag so the plane would continue to glide instead of falling like a stone, they said. He kept the nose down and the airspeed up until it came time to land in the field.

"He had very little choice and made the best of it," pilot and Creswell neighbor Jerry Norcia said.

CAPTION(S):

A v i a t i o n Brian Davies / The Register-Guard Deputy Ed Lagrone stands watch at the site where a plane made an emergency landing in a field southeast of the Creswell Airport on Wednesday. Please turn to PLANE, Page D4 Plane: Pilot's skill gains praise Continued from Page D1