Plane crash lands on golf course near Calgary airport; pilot suffers minor injuries

Pilot has a rough landing on a local golf course A rough landing for a pilot, coming up short of the runway at the Calgary airport and down in a bunker on a nearby golf course.

A small plane with a single pilot crash landed on a golf course near the Calgary International Airport on Friday afternoon.

Emergency crews, including several vehicles, responded to the scene at the Wingfield Golf Club, located south of the airport, at approximately 12:50 p.m.

The pilot and sole occupant, a man, suffered minor injuries, according to Calgary police. He was assessed on scene.

EMS said the incident was an “unscheduled landing” and the man was taken to hospital as part of protocol.

The plane could be seen sitting on the grass at the golf course as crews investigated.

“With the severity of an incident like this, with this many people around, this close to the airport, this close to a lot of commercial occupancies in and around the area, we are very, very fortunate that we escaped with one person with minor injuries,” Keith Stahl, a battalion chief with the Calgary Fire Department, said.

According to the fire department, the aircraft left the Calgary airport two hours before the incident occurred.

“It took off from Calgary YYC and did appear to be potentially on its way back to YYC,” Stahl said.

The cause of the crash has not yet been determined. The Transportation Safety Board confirmed it is sending an investigator to the scene, identifying the plane as a Piper PA-31 Navajo.

With the pilot taken care of, emergency crews transitioned to mitigating any environmental concerns from the crash, which included a small fuel spill.

Dale Henderson, who has worked at the golf course for 14 years, says he’s never seen anything like this.

“We were sitting here looking at our carts, and I just looked up and I said, ‘There’s an airplane crashed on our course,’” Henderson, the course’s supervisor of outside services, said.

“First thing we did, (is) run to see if anybody was hurt.”

The plane landed on the first hole of the front nine, nicknamed “Runway.” That section of the course has been shut down for the day, but two other sets of nine holes remain open.

“The hole was clear, so at that point there was nothing that could have gone wrong, besides the plane coming down,” Scott Haswell, the head professional at Wingfield Golf Club, said.

The golf course’s staff were the first on the scene to assist the pilot. Wingfield staff will be working to clean up the hole, but any significant damage appears to have been avoided with the plane mostly affecting a sand bunker.

Golfer Kelly Folk said it’s the first time he’s seen a plane on a golf course and is just glad the pilot wasn’t seriously injured.

“We’re going to keep our heads up now,” he said.

With files from Tyson Fedor