[Tim Hancock]

The guy with the Corsair project had some time in Corsairs during Korea (not in combat). He spent 15 yrs building this thing. He was 79 yrs old at the time he did this. He had just finished flying his test time and he was accustomed to landing at a local airport with a wide, long paved runway. I doubt he had landed at a "small grass strip" in years even in his old 172. He came in hot (my guess is about 90 mph) and set it on it's main gear smoothly just past the threshold (this left him with at least 2400' of runway to stop on). I think he panicked and stomped on the binders hard! We found skid marks for about 50' before
the prop strikes started showing up in the grass. He admitted later that the view ahead looked alot different than what he was accustomed to at his long paved strip, he admitted he screwed up big time.

The funny thing is, is that if he had never touched the brakes he would have stopped after only using about half of my 2500' runway. Last I heard he is repairing the plane.

I fly into 1500' strips with my Pacer with no issues as do many of my flying buddies. This guy just had too little recent flying time and probably did not have the same mental edge he once had.

The guy in the ultralight could have landed past the incident safely or if he had any sense at all he could have landed on the north/south 2300' strip that intersects our E/W strip (did I mention that his "ultralight" has no brakes and that there was about 250' between the Corsair that was surrounded by about twenty people and the end of the runway he was trying to land on!). The guy is just a moron. He asked me if I would fix his wreck and I just laughed and basically told him to "go pound sand"!

John and Joe, not that there is much chance of you flying in my neck of the woods, but if you do, be sure to stop in to talk P-cars and planes. I am about 20 SW of Toledo (TOL) and my strip is called Eickmeier (OH02, which will probably not show up in your GPS databases) 2300' N/S & 2500' E/W on the Detroit sectional.