Kayakers hailed for helping to rescue pilot after plane crash

• Police say that three alert kayakers came to Couchman’s aid.
• Police said that soon after he took off from Lee Airport, his plane started to shake.
• Steve Couchman, who lives in Frederick and is 71 years old, flew the Piper Cherokee plane.

Maryland State Police said that Steve Couchman, 71, of Frederick, Maryland, lived through the crash in Edgewater, where his single-engine plane went down.

Authorities say that kayakers who acted quickly after a single-engine plane crashed into an icy creek in Maryland on Monday morning are being called heroes.

Maryland State Police say that the plane crashed into Beards Creek in Edgewater, near the Lee Airport, just before 10:30 a.m.

Steve Couchman, who lives in Frederick and is 71 years old, flew the Piper Cherokee plane.

Police said that soon after he took off from Lee Airport, his plane started to shake.

Police say that three alert kayakers came to Couchman’s aid.

“Two civilians and an on-duty police officer from the Anne Arundel County Police Department heard the pilot’s call for help and used three kayaks to skim across the frozen creek to help him. The pilot got out of the plane as it was going down and stood on the wing. “Once the kayakers were close enough, the pilot was able to hold on to one of them to stay afloat,” police said in a statement.

Police said that soon after, people from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources came by boat. There, an officer broke through the ice and pulled the pilot into the boat. Couchman was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

About 35 miles south of Baltimore is Edgewater.

Anne Arundel County Fire Department Lt. Jennifer Macallair said that the pilot didn’t get hypothermia because the kayakers helped him quickly. Macallair said that the pilot’s injuries did not look like they would kill him.

She said of the two civilian kayakers, “What they did today was heroic.” “This morning, our crews had to deal with ice on the creek, which is very dangerous for anyone in the water. Hypothermia can happen very quickly. So the fact that these two people saw what was happening, got in their kayaks, and went to where he was probably saved his life.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said they knew what kind of plane crashed and that it happened just west of the airport. Monday, no one knew right away what caused the crash.

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