The Next Day, An Ultralight Helicopter Goes Down In Ashland Reservoir

Troopers assigned to the State Police Barracks in Belchertown and the Air Wing, along with FAA and Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) personnel, responded Tuesday to calls of a plane landing inside the Quabbin Reservoir just east of Amherst. The pilot contacted State Police communicating that he had landed his plane on a sandbar due to mechanical issues and was not injured.

Troopers responding confirmed that the pilot, a 42-year old Newport, Rhode Island man, was uninjured and that the plane was intact. The plane,a Seawind with tail number N89XL, is a 2015 fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft, according to a Massachusetts State Police news release.

The pilot, identified as 42-year-old Guillaume de Ramel from Newport, Rhode Island. He reported having engine trouble before landing the plane on the sandbar, and was uninjured in the off-airport landing.

Television station WWLP reports that the pilot hired a helicopter to lift the Seawind off the sandbar and carry it to nearby Orange Municipal Airport.

But that wasn't the only aircraft to encounter a body of water in The Bay State this week, and the pilot of an ultralight helicopter will probably have a lot more work to do.

Television station WBZ reports that the one-place rotorcraft went down in Ashland Reservoir southwest of Framingham, MA on Wednesday afternoon and sank to the bottom of the lake. Pilot David Diana was uninjured and was rescued by a nearby boater.

Diana told the station he flies his aircraft from the Marlborough, MA airport nearly every day. On this day, however, he experienced an engine problem. He told the station "there was no place to go. So I got it over the trees and dropped it in the water."

Divers recovered the helicopter from the water a few hours after the accident.

(Top image courtesy MSP state police. Lower imaged from YouTube video posted by WWLP)

FMI: www.ntsb.gov