Indian-origin doctor pulls Harrison Ford out of crashed aircraft

Dr Sanjay Khurana was close to finishing a golf game when a vintage plane clipped a tree and “dropped like a rock”onto the green. He rushed to the crash, finding a pilot bleeding from a deep gash in his head.

When the surgeon got a closer look, he was stunned to see the pilot was Harrison Ford, the actor he grew up watching in the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movie franchises. “I’m a child of the ‘80s. I’m a big fan,” Khurana said on Friday. One of Hollywood’s pre-eminent stars, who is also an experienced pilot, crash-landed his World War II-era plane Thursday, but he was conscious and able to talk when witnesses pulled him from the wreckage.

Soon after Ford took off from Santa Monica Municipal Airport near Los Angeles, he radioed that the single engine of his 1942 Ryan Aeronautical ST3KR stopped working and he was going to make an immediate return. Ford, who received his pilot’s license in the 1990s, glided his plane onto a fairway near the airport in what aviation experts characterized as a skillful landing given a total loss of power above a densely populated area. Ford’s publicist, Ina Treciokas, said the actor’s injuries were “not life-threatening, and he is expected to make a full recovery.”Ford’s son Ben tweeted Thursday from the hospital: “Dad is ok. Battered, but ok! He is every bit the man you would think he is. He is an incredibly strong man.” No one on the ground was hurt. Ford did a remarkable job guiding his crippled plane away from homes and, without enough altitude to reach the airport, onto the golf course’s relatively flat ground.