Split-Second Decision Averts Disaster

By Patricia Older

MIDDLE GROVE – Disaster was narrowly missed on Tuesday when the pilot of a small aircraft that had engine failure remembered a field he had just passed over and turned his plane around and headed for the patch of land just off of Middle Grove Road in Greenfield.

William Booth, who had just left the Saratoga County Airport for his summer home in Blue Mountain Lake, was flying over Greenfield toward Lake Desolation when his plane began to experience engine problems.

“I saw the plane fly over,” said Brad Hall, who lives off of Daketown Road. “And then I saw him come back and it sounded like the engine was going faster than the plane was travelling—the plane appeared to be going really slow.”

Then, Hall says, he heard nothing at all.

Booth said that when he realized his plane, a Lake Renegade—one of only 100 known to be in existence—started to have mechanical problems, he remembered the field and decided to head toward it. If he had flown a few minutes more, he would have been over the woods that cover the Mount Pleasant mountaintop or Sacandaga Lake. Even where Booth landed posed problems with a large subdivision nearby and hundreds of homes in the area.

Booth said even the field posed a problem for him as he tried to guide his now-disabled plane past telephone poles, a major roadway and utility wires.

Booth, who said he kept thinking of the pilot’s adage to ‘fly the crash,’ was only slightly injured. A resident, whose house sat only a few yards from the accident scene, saw the plane crash and ran out to help the shaken pilot, who suffered bruising and a few abrasions when the plane made the bumpy landing.

The sound of the airplane crashing was heard by residents as far as a mile away. One woman said that while she did not see the plane, she was outside tending to her horses when she heard a loud boom.

“It startled me—I didn’t know what had happened,” she said.

The crash closed down a section of Middle Grove Road just west of Sandhill Road and north of North Creek Road for hours as firemen and the Federal Aviation Administration worked the scene.

Greenfield Fire District responded to the call, as well as the Saratoga County Sheriff’s Office and the FAA.