The wreckage of a plane that crashed this weekend into the Connecticut River between Newbury, Vermont and Haverhill, New Hampshire was removed from the water Monday in a complicated recovery project.
As one of the people on the plane received treatment for serious injuries, the job of removing the wreckage took most of the day.
In what everyone involved called a "first" for them, a wreckage recovery crew hoisted the small experimental plane out of the Connecticut River in Haverhill late Monday afternoon.
The plane, capable of landing on water, crashed upriver Sunday afternoon while attempting a landing, New Hampshire State Police said.
The pilot and a passenger were injured, one seriously, police said Sunday.
"It's not often that you see a plane in a river," said Brandon Senoski, who watched part of the recovery of the plane Monday.
Just getting the plane out of the water was complicated work.
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From a farm on the Newbury side of the river, the team waded in, first appearing to collect possible clues to help investigators, including what looked like a camera that had been mounted to the plane.
They then used inflatable bags to boost the plane in the water.
With the body of the plane floating, the crew hooked it to an amphibious ATV to tow it downriver, looking for a space wide enough to pull it out and onto dry land.
The location targeted to retrieve the plane was the Bedell Bridge State Park in Haverhill.
"I've never seen something like this before," observer Zack Winchester said of both the sight of a plane in the river and the amphibious ATV towing the plane.
Along that several mile journey from the farm in Newbury downriver to the park, traffic stopped in places, with folks checking out the strange sight on the water and photographing the work.
"This is very time consuming," observer Lynn Perry said of the effort on the river. "They can't be going more than two miles an hour down the river."
There is no word yet as to what went wrong on the experimental amphibious plane. Now that it is back on dry land, the FAA and NTSB can start their investigation of the equipment aboard.
