CTV
The small aircraft was trying to land at the Saint-Esprit airfield in Canada (Picture: CTV)

A 27-year-old woman was killed while cutting grass on a ride-on mower at an airfield in Canada when a small aircraft hit her as it tried to land.

The unidentified woman died in the freak accident on Monday afternoon near the runway at the Saint-Esprit airfield, just 35 miles north of Montreal.

‘What we can understand is that the woman was on a tractor mowing the lawn and when the plane did its descent to land on the airstrip the airplane hit the woman’, explained Marc Tessier, a spokesman for the Quebec municipal police told CNN. 

According to officials, the woman worked for a company that maintained the airfield.

She was taken to a hospital after the accident where she subsequently died.

The pilot, meanwhile, was uninjured but was also taken to a hospital in shock. 

Pierre Remialle, a resident who lives close to the airfield, told CTV that he had ‘Never heard anything like that before’.

He said: ‘When you hear about someone struck by lightning, it’s overwhelming, but by a landing airplane?’

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The plane that crash-landed into the maintenance worker was a Chinese-built Nanchang CJ-6, and damage could be seen on its wing where it struck the woman.

It was a privately owned, Tessier said, and the owner of the plane was the pilot. 

Visibility at the time of the accident was high, according to Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB), and the weather ‘was appropriate for visual flight rules flying’, TSB spokesman Christ Krepski told CNN. 

An investigation into the incident has been launched but it could take weeks or months for officials to map out the series of events that led up to the accident. 

‘We’re going to have a look at what happened so we’re here today to gather information to understand the event’, Transportation safety board investigator Simon St-Pierre told CTV.

‘It’s way to early to have any conclusion so we’re going to have time to have time to gather everything and analyze what happened.’  

According to the agency, out of 170 air transportation accidents were reported to the TSB in 2020, 114 involved private aircraft. In 2020, 16 people died in accidents involving aircraft in Canada.

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