Skip to footer

McDonald's plane crash: A test flight goes bad in Louisiana

McDonald's plane crash: A Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in a McDonald's parking lot in Monroe, Louisiana. The pilot was hospitalized but no on else was injured in the plane crash.

|
(AP Photo/The News-Star, Dacia Idom)
The wreckage of a Beechcraft airplane rests in a parking lot of a McDonald's after crashing Tuesday, June 3, 2014, in Monroe, La. The pilot, the only person on board, suffered moderate injuries and was taken to a hospital. There were no reports of injuries on the ground.
  • By Staff Reuters

| New Orleans

A small plane crashed into a northern Louisiana McDonald's parking lot near the drive-thru on Tuesday, injuring the pilot and wrecking a car, an airport official said.

The Beechcraft Bonanza plane was preparing to land at the nearby Monroe Regional Airport when it clipped a tree, began to spin and then crashed into the parking lot at the fast food restaurant, said Ron Phillips, the airport's director.

The McDonald's is heavily trafficked, and an office building across the street houses state Department of Transportation officials, but no one else was injured in the crash, Phillips said.

"It could have been a lot worse," he said.

The pilot was identified by authorities as Michael Ray Martin, 41, of Calhoun, Louisiana.

He was airlifted to a hospital in Shreveport, about 100 miles (160 km) to the west, the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office said in a statement. No information was available on his condition.

According to MyArkLaMiss.com, Greg Brown from Brown's Feed & Chemical, Michael Ray Martin, 41, of Calhoun, was piloting the plane when it crashed this morning.

Brown says Martin was taking part in a test flight after repairs were made on the plane after some mechanical issues. Martin told deputies that engine quit on him while in the air, according to officials.

The plane took off from the Carmi Municipal Airport in southeastern Illinois at 8:00 a.m., the Monroe-based News-Star newspaper reported.

 Monroe Municipal Airport Manager Ron Phillips said the plane “was flying patterns and ran into difficulty.” He said the plane clipped several pine trees, causing it to spin out of control before crashing and the plane was in “pretty bad shape.”

“Part of the plane is up against the McDonald’s sign post and it looks like maybe one car was damaged. The plane broke apart, but it doesn’t seem like (there was) any other major damage to any facilities around,” Phillips said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Kaminsky in New Orleans and Lisa Bose McDermott in Texarkana, Ark.; Editing by Dan Grebler and Sandra Maler)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to McDonald's plane crash: A test flight goes bad in Louisiana
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0604/McDonald-s-plane-crash-A-test-flight-goes-bad-in-Louisiana
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe