Actor crashed his plane on a golf course in California.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: When Harrison Ford took off in his single-engine plane on Thursday, he didn’t expect he’d be crashing the aircraft into a Santa Monica golf course shortly after taking off.
Indian American spine surgeon Sanjay Khurana, who was on the 7th hole of the Penmar Golf Course, probably didn’t, either.
Khurana was among the first responders to the scene, and helped pull the injured movie star from the burning wreckage of his vintage World War II-era plane.
When Khurana saw Ford’s plane hit a tree before nose-diving into the ground, he dropped his clubs and ran to the crash site and saw “a passenger in the rear seat slumped over, in distress, [and] belted in.”
“He was stunned a bit,” Khurana said. “He was moaning and in pain.” Khurana said he quickly recognized the pilot’s famous visage.
“He was a very familiar face. Kind of somewhat of an iconic face. And yeah, I did recognize who he was,” Khurana told CBS Los Angeles.
Khurana also recounted that Ford was able to speak and move despite his injuries directly following the crash.
“You don’t go golfing expecting to see an airplane crash and to help extract someone and realize it’s someone you know from the movies, right? It’s fairly bizarre,” he mused while speaking to ABC News.
“But as a surgeon, I’ve been practicing for almost over a decade now; you deal with urgent situations. So you have to do your best for someone in distress.”
The 72-year-old star of such legendary franchises as “Indiana Jones” and “Star Wars” is expected to make a full recovery.
In a statement released later that very night, his publicist, Ina Treciokas, said while he was “banged up,” his injuries were not life-threatening.