Lance Altemose of Charleston, Pa. found himself in a precarious position when his small motorized ultralight aircraft came crashing down into the trees in Valley Forge, near River Road and the Joseph Plum Martin Trail.
"It ran out of fuel of some sort and it came down on the trees, trying to hit one of the openings out here to land the craft and he didn't make it," Upper Merion fire department deputy chief William Daywalt said.
At first, fire rescue had no idea how they were going to get Altemose out of the 80-foot poplar. They called the Coast Guard in Atlantic City, but they were over an hour away. And then, one of the rescuers noticed Mark Novitski of MJN Tree Service in Bridgeport passing by on his way home from work.
"They saw me stopped at the light down there and they said, 'Do you know anything about trees?' and I'm like, 'yeah, I know a little bit,'" Novitski said.
A little while later, Novitski was up in the tree with a chainsaw trying to bring the pilot of the small contraption out of the tree.
"I just tied him off. The fire rescue sent a harness up for me to harness him in, tie him off, tie his machine off and then just lowered him down," Novitski said.
About an hour later, Altemose was down on the ground, a bit shaken, but otherwise all right and hugging his nerve-rattled wife.
A friend of his says Altemose, who is a bit of an adventurer, is no stranger to mishaps with his craft.
"The same sort of thing happened to him a few years ago on his property, he got stuck with the same height, 60-70 feet up in the tree," friend Chris Lundmark said.
Meanwhile, as for Novitski, he agrees that this is the most unusual tree job he's ever done.
Authorities are still doing a little bit of investigation on the pilot's credentials. They were, however, grateful of the clear weather on Thursday because if this had been last week, they may have had a tough time finding the crash site and the pilot.
