By Jeff Lipton and Keith Grant
"That's not going to make the airport," one of them said as the piper puttered along.
Minutes later, practice was canceled as about 60 Long Beach firefighters were called to Atlantic Beach as the pilot of the small single-engine plane was forced to make an emergency landing on the beach due south of the Atlantic Beach Bridge on Sunday night. He put the struggling bird down perfectly on an empty stretch of sand.
"The guy did a wonderful job," said Long Beach fire chief Scott Kemins. "It was a nice, smooth landing."
The plane, a 1946 Piper PA-12, was en route from Bridgeport, Conn., to Longwood, N.J., when its engine began to malfunction, officials said.
The pilot, identified as Roland Booher, 46, of Brooklyn, radioed a distress signal over Atlantic Beach at about 6:40 p.m. and safely landed the aircraft on a deserted strip of beach, about 200 feet from the New Nautilus, a transient hotel, between Cayuga and Broome avenues. No one was reported injured, and the pilot refused medical attention, officials said.
"According to the pilot, he believed his carburetor iced up, causing the engine to stall," said Det. Sgt. John Azzata of the Fourth Squad. "There's no criminality involved."
But a possible terrorist attack crossed the minds of some law-enforcement officials. "There was a whole lot of police presence over there. But I don't believe the police were actually concerned [about a possible terrorist attack]," said one official who arrived at the scene.
When the single-seat, single-propeller plane landed, the police departments from Nassau County and New York City rushed to the scene, as did the Coast Guard. The Atlantic Beach Rescue Squad responded with 21 members, three pieces of rescue equipment and a boat on stand-by, said Jonathan Kohan, chief of the squad. The Long Beach Fire Department reponds to any plane down with an automatic "general alarm," according to Kemins, and reponded with a few dozen members. Half were turned back once it was clear the plane had landed safely.
"He was pretty lucky," Kohan said of the pilot, adding that the plane landed about 100 feet from the water. "It was an emergency landing, but he did not crash.
"I think from an inter-agency coordinating standpoint, everything worked out fine."
After the scene was secured, officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board arrived to investigate. The pilot was detained by police and questioned by the FAA. After an investigation, the FAA released the plane to the pilot, but the next question was whether the plane could be flown off the wet sand or whether it would have to be towed away.
By mid-morning the following day, the FAA decided to fly the plane out of the area, and gas was brought to the aircraft, authorities said.
"The poor guy had engine trouble and had to land," said James Gary Connors, a former Atlantic Beach Village trustee who lives on Bermuda Street. "What a great job he did. He walked away without a scratch."
One FAA official at the scene said the plane is owned by a company that does airborne banner advertising.
This marked the first time a plane had landed in Atlantic Beach since 1999, when a plane from Atlantic City crash-landed, injuring three people.
