Police copter heroine: Pilot
swoops to halt train and avert disaster at level crossing
From the birdseye vantage of
her helicopter, police pilot Kathryn Chapman saw disaster
unfolding.
An abandoned car sat on a
level crossing with police chasing the driver on foot while a
passenger train hurtled towards the vehicle at 50mph.
Then, in a scene that could
have come from a Hollywood movie, Mrs Chapman swooped to the
rescue.
Flying at three times the
speed of the train, she dropped to little more than 60ft above the
ground and managed to get ‘ahead and just above’ it.
She signalled to the driver to
stop by swinging the aircraft round to face the train and flashing
the landing lights.
Realising there was an
emergency, the driver slammed on the brakes and brought the train
to a halt just 30 yards from the crossing.
Mrs Chapman, who had had to
avoid a flyover only a few hundred yards away, knew exactly what to
do because she was also a qualified train driver and briefly had a
job driving the same type of train four years ago.
This meant she knew what
signals to use to get the driver to stop.
Yesterday the mother-of-two,
51, said: ‘My stomach churned a little bit when I looked across and
saw the train heading towards the vehicle and the officers on the
line. It was probably less than a mile away and there was no time
to spare.’
The Humberside Police
helicopter was tracking the Ford Mondeo after the driver ignored a
police request for it to stop in Hull at around 2pm on
Monday.
When the driver
abandoned the car, Mrs Chapman sprung into
action.
The pilot, who is also a Royal
Navy Gulf War veteran, estimated the train was travelling at around
50mph before she intervened and the helicopter swooped down at
around 150mph to catch up.
Heroine: Kathryn Chapman,
pictured in front of the helicopter in which she performed her
heroics, knew the warning to give the train driver to make him
stop
The crossing where the
abandoned car had stopped on the level crossing as a train
approached
‘I knew roughly the signals
the driver would have been looking for,’ she said. ‘The rule book
says lights being flashed directly in your field of view should be
taken as an emergency stop signal.’
The whole operation took
little more than a minute.
A spokesman for Northern Rail
said the Sheffield to Bridlington service ‘was brought to a
controlled stop as instructed by a Network Rail signal operator who
was aware of the car on the track and alerted oncoming trains to it
by bringing them to a standstill’.
But Chief Superintendent Colin
Andrews disputed that version of events, saying it was the police
action that saved the day.
‘This was a reckless act by
the driver of the vehicle, which could have resulted in the deaths
of a number of people, but as a result of the quick thinking of the
Humberside Police helicopter crew it was avoided,’ he
said.
The motorist, a 40-year-old
man from Hull, was arrested at the scene for failing to stop and
suspected drugs offences. He has been released on police
bail.