Two men survive plane crash in trees.

Byline: Rebecca Nolan The Register-Guard

COTTAGE GROVE - After 16 years of living near the Cottage Grove Airport, Mike Arnold is accustomed to the sight and sound of small planes overhead.

On Thursday he saw something new.

"I started going to Wal-Mart and all of the sudden a plane fell out of the sky," he said.

A 1962 Mooney M20C preparing to land from the south lost engine power about 2 p.m. and fell nose-first to the ground.

Arnold, a captain with the Eugene Fire Department, had just left home to take his teenage daughter to the store.

"I could see his propeller sputtering a little bit," he said. "He couldn't have been more than 100 feet from the ground. He turned to make his way toward the airport and his propeller stopped altogether."

Arnold and his daughter watched as the plane went down, skimming the tops of young trees and landing nose down on an island in Row River near Sears Road.

He shouted at his wife to call 911 and ran toward the crash site. His daughter waited in the car.

"There was no smoke, no fire," he said. "The trees definitely held them up."

He waded across the river with four other bystanders, including a teenage boy and his mother.

"We were yelling at them to see if they would acknowledge us," Arnold said of the victims. "The pilot said, `We're OK,' so I knew there was more than one."

Both men had climbed out of the plane and were standing up. They were Charles Bodie, 62, of Springfield, who was at the controls, and Mark Clark, 51, of Eugene. Bodie's injuries were worse than those of his flying partner, Arnold said.

"He had a baseball-sized hematoma on his forehead and his face was bloody," Arnold said. "He hit the instrument panel pretty hard. The plane had lap belts, not shoulder belts."

Arnold, a trained paramedic, performed a quick spinal exam on the two men before he and the others helped them to the roadway, where an ambulance waited.

Both men were taken to Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene with injuries that did not appear life-threatening, Lane County sheriff's Lt. Bill Thompson said.

The crash remained under investigation. A representative of the Federal Aviation Administration was expected to travel to the site today.

Both men are pilots. Bodie was new to the aircraft, so Clark was serving as his instructor pilot, Thompson said.

The pair had already landed and taken off at the Creswell airport and were preparing to do the same in Cottage Grove.

"As they were making the approach, the engine just flat quit on them," Thompson said.

Clark took over the controls and tried to maneuver the single-engine craft as well as possible, the lieutenant said. The trees probably prevented a harder impact, he said.

CAPTION(S):

A spectator views a plane that crashed Thursday on an island in Row River near Cottage Grove. The occupants walked away from the wreck.