Two people walked away with minor injuries from an emergency plane landing on a golf course in Sydney’s northern beaches, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported on Monday, August 18.
The forced landing happened during a training flight just after 2 pm local time on Sunday, with an instructor pilot and student on board.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is asking witnesses with videos of the emergency landing, has confirmed the aircraft was a Piper Cherokee. A video provided by Magda Gawin to all news outlets shows how the plane slams down at the Mona Vale golf course. ABC said an instructor pilot and student, both in their 50s, were on board. One of them, whose identity is not clear at present, suffered minor facial injuries, the news outlet added. The ATSB said it is gathering evidence, but it’s unclear whether it will conduct a formal investigation.
‘Just feel out of the sky’
In a TikTok video, a witness said the plane “just fell out of the sky”, while another adds, “It was crazy, we literally just heard this noise, and then all of a sudden it went bang. And next thing you know, these guys are still playing their golf game, pretending like a plane just hasn’t fallen from the sky.”
Keanu Turnewitsch was on the course on the “third out the back” waiting for a friend to take a swing, when he said a “nice big shadow came over the top. I thought, ‘It’s a big bird’ and looked up and there was an aeroplane close enough I could have thrown a club up and hit it,” Mr Turnewitsch told the ABC.
“It was dead silence. About 30 seconds later, we had a big crunching sound … then all the ambulances and everything started coming past and sirens for 20, 30 minutes. By the time we got back up around, there was an aeroplane on the golf course,” he added.
Information from Flight Tracker shows the small aircraft took off from Shellharbour near Wollongong this afternoon and made a stop in Camden before continuing its flight north.
