A pilot is being praised for saving his passenger and himself from serious injury during a light plane accident in Northland.
Emergency services were called to Pouto Road — south of Dargaville — about 10.30am, after a two-seater aircraft crash-landed in a paddock there.
Two men have escaped with minor cuts and bruises and have been taken to the local hospital for a check-up.
Dargaville Volunteer Fire Station chief fire officer Jeffrey Palmer says a perfect landing meant the men escaped relatively unscathed.
He says if the pilot had gone a couple of hundred metres further he would've landed in a flat paddock but he just happened to hit a hilly paddock, then a fence post.
