By Jessie Burchette
jburchette@salisburypost
MOUNT ULLA ó The workers and horses at the Lazy 5 Ranch knew something was wrong when a plane sputtered and lost power Saturday afternoon.
They knew it was coming down ó somewhere close by.
When workers heard the plane struggling, they took out toward where it appeared to be going down and dozens of draft horses looked up and decided to get out of the way.
Around 4 p.m Saturday, Jim Smiley, a 50-year pilot, was headed home to Mocksville from a gathering at Miller Air Park.
The engine in his home-built lightweight plane shut off. He got it restarted and headed back toward Miller Air Park.
But the engine shut off again and wouldn’t restart.
Staff at Lazy 5 along N.C. 150 watched as the pilot did a 360 degree turn and headed back toward the pasture.
Smiley landed his plane, a mixture of tubing, canvass and a Mazda engine, almost without incident.
“It probably would have been a regular landing if not for the fact the field has terraces,” Henry Hampton, owner of the Lazy 5, said Sunday.
The irregular surface broke off a part of the landing gear.
When the Lazy 5 staffers reached the plane, Smiley was sitting upright.
“He was just embarrassed – said he’d been flying for 50 years and this was the first time he had ever had to use his crash landing training,” Hampton said.
Smiley told WCNC Channel 6 in Charlotte that he was always on the lookout for a place to land. “One of the things that you do when you fly light airplanes like this, is you’re constantly looking for a place to land if the engine quits.”
And the horses, who wait their turns to pull wagonloads of visitors through the exotic animal ranch, stood by watching all the commotion.
“Animals are very perceptive, they notice things going on around them,” Hampton said, explaining that when the horses saw the plane coming down, they got out of the way.
“They didn’t go far, they just got out of the way, got in a circle and stood and watched,” he said.
The West Rowan Fire Department responded as did a half dozen Rowan Sheriff’s deputies.
Smiley wasn’t injured, but his plane may have seen its last flight. He spent four years building the plane.
Hampton and Lazy 5 staffers waited for the Federal Aviation Administration representatives to arrive on the scene.
Once they had assessed the mishap, the staffers helped Smiley disassemble the plane and load it on a trailer for the trip back to Mocksville around 8 p.m.