Off-duty officer recovering from emergency plane landing speaks from hospital

Now to a remarkable story concerning that small plane crash in a park in the city's Torresdale section last week. Tonight, the student pilot, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer, is talking for the first time about the ordeal. Actually, the Port of Brown and Gallagher spoke to him as he still recovers in the hospital from his injury. That off-duty Philadelphia police officer is still in the hospital recovering. He has a long road ahead of him. We spoke with him tonight as he was being moved out of the ICU here at Jefferson. He said there's one thing that he wants to make clear. The one thing that I want to stress is this was not a crash. It was nearly a week ago when a flight instructor heroically landed the small plane in Torresdale without injuring anyone on the ground. Daniel Eckert, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer, was on one of his last training flights. We're 2,300 pounds of metal with 40 gallons of fuel and we're falling and all I see is houses. He said they went through pre-flight check. Takeoff was normal. They were heading back to practice more takeoffs and landings when the engine just quit. I just said to my instructor, John, I just lost my engine. That's when John H., the instructor, took over. He said air traffic control told them they had a runway ready at Northeast Philadelphia Airport. However, they weren't going to make it. They declared they had 90 seconds to get us to get down from where we were. Every decision he made, he had less than a second to make. Next thing he knew, he said the fire department was cutting him out of the airplane because he was trapped. Since then, he's had two surgeries, recovering from a shattered tibia and fibula, a broken forearm, a skull fracture, and a lot of cuts and bruises. I don't know what the outlook is going to be for when I can actually fly again, but I will be able to and that's the important part. Now, once he's able to, he says he plans on finishing his training and then eventually to be able to fly for a living one day. Meanwhile, the NTSB and the FAA are continuing to investigate what happened. Reporting here in Center City, Breonna Gallagher, Channel 6 Action News.