FAA investigating airplane incident reported to involve actor Harrison Ford
By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said on Tuesday it is investigating an incident involving a single-engine private plane that flew over an American Airlines Boeing 737 jet in Santa Ana, California.
NBC News reported that actor Harrison Ford was piloting the private plane, an Aviat Husky, that was involved in an incident at John Wayne Airport on Monday afternoon.
FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the plane was cleared to land at runway 20L and the pilot correctly read back the clearance. "The pilot then landed on a taxiway that runs parallel to the runway, overflying a Boeing 737 that was holding short of the runway," Gregor said.
American Airlines flight 1546 to Dallas had 110 passengers and a six-person crew and was waiting for the private plane to land before taking off, a person familiar with the matter said. It left shortly after the private plane landed without incident.
American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said the airline reported the incident to the National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA.
NBC News said Ford was captured on air traffic control recordings asking, "Was that airliner meant to be underneath me?" Air traffic controllers informed Ford that he had landed on a taxiway rather than the runway, NBC said.
A representative for Ford declined to comment.
In 2015, Ford told investigators he did not recall the moments before he crashed his vintage plane onto a Los Angeles-area golf course, suffering serious injuries and badly damaging the aircraft.
The star of "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was the sole occupant of the 1942 single-engine Ryan Aeronautical ST-3KR when it went down on a golf course near the Santa Monica Municipal Airport in March 2015.
In 1999, Ford and a flight instructor were in a helicopter that crashed north of Los Angeles, according to a Los Angeles Times report at the time.
(This story was refiled to fix film title in paragraph 9.)
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Dan Grebler)
