A pilot walked away without injuries after a vintage single engine aircraft made an emergency landing on a grassy area at Victoria International Airport.
The Nanchang CJ-6 did a gear up belly landing, which means the aircraft landed without landing gear, around 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, said airport spokesman Rod Hunchak. The aircraft landed in a patch of grass near a runway. Hunchak said he did not know the location of the plane’s takeoff or intended landing.
Hunchak stressed that the aircraft did not crash. Airport firefighters and B.C. Ambulance paramedics responded but the pilot was not injured, he said.
The plane was hoisted with a crane onto a flatbed trailer and driven away.
Witness Aaron Burton said the Nanchang CJ-6’s landing gear would not lower, forcing the pilot to circle around Cordova Bay. Burton, who was flying a Cessna 172 at the time and heard the pilot’s conversation with air traffic control, said the pilot announced that he could not lower the gear and he was heading for the airport for a gear up landing.
From the sky, Burton watched the pilot perform the emergency landing at the airport, sliding down runway 21 and coming to rest on the grass at the end of the runway.
“The pilot was okay and walking around,” Burton said.
Kim Passmore, who lives in North Saanich, saw the plane moments after the emergency landing. She said the propeller was slightly bent but there was very little damage to the plane.
“The plane is actually in pretty good shape all things considered,” she said. “He must have done an amazing job to land it.”
The pilot, she said, was smiling and in good spirits.
“I’m sure he was just very thankful to land on the ground in one piece,” she said.
Her husband Doug knew that the aircraft was a Soviet-era warplane. The Nanchang is a type of Chinese military training plane which were built in the Soviet-era starting in 1954, according to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum.
“It was a spectacular plane,” she said. “To have it be a historical plane with a happy outcome for both pilot and plane is great.”
