Pilot makes emergency landing in Northwest Iowa without injury

The local sheriff’s praising the grace under fire of a private pilot whose engine quit before the trip was done, a few miles east of Spencer. A single-engine airplane had to make an emergency landing in northwest Iowa when its engine lost power Wednesday morning. The Palo Alto County sheriff’s office says Mike Radcliff of Marshall, Wisconsin, the pilot and lone occupant, landed the 1965 Cessna on its belly in a farm field northeast of Ruthven. Radcliff was headed to the Northwest Iowa Regional Airport in Spencer. Officers say he was not injured in the landing, though sheriff Russ Jergen says he had to do some maneuvering in between power lines and roadways to land in the bean field. The airplane suffered about five-thousand dollars worth of damage, and the FAA, as always, will investigate.