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Must-see: Man survives plane crash into a tree

Incredibly, by crashing into a tree a pilot may have actually avoided worse injuries. 
In this screenshot from surveillance footage released by the Plainville Police Department, a plane hits a tree and lands in a Connecticut parking lot. 

He was flying to have breakfast, but he got more of a morning jolt than he anticipated.

A man miraculously escaped with minor injuries when his small plane crashed into a tree in a Connecticut parking lot and tumbled to the ground, according to local media.

The accident, which happened near the Robertson Field airport in Plainville, was caught on a surveillance camera.

The video, which was released by the town soon after the Monday-morning accident, shows the plane, a single-engine Cessna 172, flying low, hitting a tree and then falling in the parking lot. Without the tree, which bent on impact, the pilot’s fate would likely have been much worse.

"I was very fortunate I got out of it without any real injuries," Manfred Forst told local TV station WVIT. "I'm just so thankful."

Forst, who town manager Robert Lee said is 80, was taken to the Hospital of Central Connecticut in nearby New Britain with minor injuries, Plainville police told the station. He said he gave his wife a big kiss when he got home after the crash.

According to the Hartford Courant, police taped off part of the parking lot of Carling Technologies, where the damaged plane landed. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the crash, police told the newspaper.

A witness, Dave Thayer, of Bristol, who told the Courant that he frequently visits the airport to watch landings and takeoffs, said he saw the plane approaching very low before it suddenly turned away from the runway.

“I knew he had a problem. It was wavering, it was going very slow,” Thayer told the paper. “I heard the bang and knew that he went down.”

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