In this image from video provided by News 12 Long Island, a small plane sits in the brush at Frances S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach, N.Y.
Two city firefighters on a Army National Guard helicopter training mission helped save a pilot from a fiery Suffolk County plane crash that killed his two passengers Sunday.
Firefighter Joseph McCarthy was piloting a chopper from MacArthur Airport when he and his crew got word that a plane had gone missing near Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach.
The small vintage propeller aircraft crashed into a bank of trees around 11:20 a.m., killing flight instructor Arieh Narkunski, 64, of Brooklyn and Robert A. Wilkie, 65, of Hempstead, Newsday reported.
Pilot Richard Rosenthal, 61, of Huntington Station, L.I., survived and was trying to crawl out of the plane when the helicopter came upon a line of smoke, rising from the tree line.
“It was an older airplane that had a canopy. It looked like he had it open, but not enough to get out, but he was kind of pinned,” McCarthy said.
So he landed and let off four members of the crew, including FDNY firefighter Yaanique Scott, 29. The plane was on fire, billowing thick smoke.
“He was trying to escape on the left side of the aircraft, and the winds were blowing from right to left,” Scott said. “I got up immediately on the right wing with the fire extinguisher, trying to push the fire back…. He looked up at me and he said, ‘There’s still two other people in the aircraft.’”
Scott pushed back the canopy and helped Rosenthal out, but more smoke and flames started pouring from the plane.
Joseph McCarthy of ladder 55 helped save a plane crash victim in Suffolk County.
(FDNY)
Yaanique Scott of Engine 291 helped save a plane crash victim in Suffolk County.
(FDNY)
Scott looked for the other passengers, calling out, but couldn’t find them amid the smoke.
He then helped Rosenthal get clear of the crash. Rosenthal had suffered four broken ribs and ankle pain, and had inhaled a lot of smoke, Scott said.
“If he would have stayed there any longer, I believe he would have succumbed from that,” Scott said.
McCarthy, 39, a Rockland county resident, enlisted in the Air Force in 1996, and served in Afghanistan after Sept. 11. He’s also served in Kuwait.
He’s been with the FDNY for the past 15 years, and is assigned to Ladder 55 in the Bronx.
Scott, a probie and Brooklyn resident who graduated from the FDNY academy last year, has served in the who’s served in the National Guard for 11 years. He’s assigned to Engine 291 in Queens.
“Everything charged when tower said he believes that there might be a crash. Just everything changed, it went from routine — we’re gonna go do this training mission — to we’re in the fight,” Scott said. “We didn’t know what we were getting into but we knew we were going to do something.”
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