A 68-year-old woman was forced to take the controls of a single-engine aircraft as it was landing because the pilot became incapacitated. The Massachusetts State Police said that the 2006 Piper Meridian was preparing to land at Martha's Vineyard Airport on Saturday (July 15) afternoon when the pilot suffered a medical emergency.
The woman, who was not identified, could not deploy the landing gear and crashed the plane in a grassy field several hundred feet from the runway. The left wing of the aircraft broke in half from the impact as the belly of the plane slammed into the ground.
The woman was not injured but was taken to the hospital as a precaution and later released. The pilot was airlifted to a hospital in Boston in serious, life-threatening condition.
The plane departed from Winchester, New York, earlier in the day. At least one flight had to be diverted from Martha's Vineyard to Boston due to the incident.