LaGrange man struck, hurt by his own airplane at Elyria Airport

ELYRIA — A man was taken to the hospital Tuesday evening after his own airplane knocked him to the ground in a mishap at the Elyria Airport on Middle Avenue. The pilot, who has not been named, but is identified in a Lorain County Sheriff's Office news release as a 57-year-old LaGrange man, was fueling the two-seat plane about 5:14 p.m. with chocks under the wheels to keep it in place, said Lorain County Sheriff's Capt. Daniel Ashdown. No one was in the cockpit. The aircraft was of the hand-start or "prop-start" variety, requiring the pilot to manually force the propeller to start spinning. "You physically have to pull the propeller to start it," Ashdown said. "… When he went to prop-start the plane, it jumped the chocks, striking him, which caused injury." Ashdown was not at the airport when the incident happened, but he said it appears the pilot was knocked down by the plane itself and not struck by the propeller. After it struck the pilot, the aircraft continued moving with no one inside and collided with the fuel tank. There was no fuel spillage from the tank and the plane was stopped by the collision, damaging the right wing. "It was lucky that the wing actually caught the tank to stop the plane from moving, because who knows how long it would have taxied," Ashdown said. A responding deputy was not able to talk to the man before he was transported to University Hospitals-Elyria Medical Center for medical treatment, so the Sheriff's Office intends to follow up with him. Because the airplane was not in flight when the mishap happened, the Sheriff's Office classified it as an "incident," meaning the agency's report will be forwarded to the National Transportation Safety Board for review and the Federal Aviation Administration for informational purposes, Ashdown said. Contact Dylan Reynolds at (440) 329-7123 or dreynolds@chroniclet.com. Follow him on Twitter @drey1357.