RHODES CORNER, N.S. - An ultralight airplane crashed in southwestern Nova Scotia on Tuesday, leaving one person dead and another injured.
The RCMP said someone called 911 just after 9 a.m. to report a small plane had crashed in the Rhodes Corner area, between Lunenburg and Bridgewater.
Emergency crews were on the scene and the survivor was transported to hospital in Halifax, though there was no word on that person's condition.
It wasn't clear what made the plane go down. The RCMP said they would investigate, as would the Transportation Safety Board.
An eyewitness told radio station CKBW that the plane appeared to be having trouble right before it crashed.
"He was grazing over the trees, and she was waving back and forth,'' said Arnold Whynott. "He just started waving and she dove sideways, and there's where it ended up.''
Whynott said the plane made a loud thump when it hit the ground and it eventually caught fire.
Kimber Bennett, an ultralight pilot from Bridgewater, flew by the crash site Tuesday morning.
He said it appeared as though a small float plane was approaching the water to land when it crashed into a gravel pit a few hundred metres from the shore.
Bennett said the plane appeared to be very badly damaged.
"It basically looked like it just dropped out of the sky and hit the ground,'' Bennett, who is involved in the Ultralight Flyers' Organization of Nova Scotia, said in an interview.
"It was a write-off.''
According to statistics from the Transportation Safety Board, there were 15 accidents resulting in four deaths involving Canadian-registered ultralight planes from January to July of this year.
Last year, there was one person killed and a total of 27 accidents.
Between 2001 and 2005, there was an average of nine people killed a year.
