By Dominique Herman
As a golfing couple from Mpumalanga were heading down the 17th fairway on Wednesday during a game in Stellenbosch, a smoking Harvard plane crashed into their golf cart, tore its roof off and threw one of the passengers on to the ground, before spinning into the bush.
"I was taking a photo of the plane coming in - not thinking it was going to hit us," said Mary-Ann Webster, from the Stellenbosch Medi-Clinic, where she and fiancé Al Leroy were treated for whiplash, bruising, gashes and a black eye.
"Luckily we were left with our heads on," said Webster. Webster had been driving the cart but said she "froze" when she saw the plane coming towards them.
Had Leroy not pushed down the accelerator pedal, the propeller or undercarriage of the plane might have hit them.
"We consider ourselves extremely fortunate," said Webster. On Wednesday, Leroy, a former Phalaborwa mining boss, lay in bed with a blood-spattered shirt and a head wrapped in bandages to protect the 20 stitches he had received.
Retired commercial pilot Kevin Bell said neither he, nor the other pilot in the plane, who works for British Airways, had been injured.
It was a "forced landing" but until the civil aviation authority had conducted its investigation, he did not want to say any more.
Rod Wakeford, estate manager of the De Zalze winelands golf estate where the aircraft made its dramatic landing, said that the plane's wing had clipped the cart whose top half lay in bits on the grass metres away.
"That didn't hit a building and for nobody to get killed was quite a remarkable effort. He landed incredibly well," Wakeford said. He added that the couple was "shaken but not too stirred".
As the silver-and-orange striped plane sat in the shade of the trees with its mangled wing tips and burned nose, project manager and eyewitness Carlof van der Merwe recounted how the plane had flown at "first-floor level" with its engine idling.
As it flew past him, he saw the "shocked eyes" of the pilot in the rear seat as he looked frantically from side to side. The Harvard Club of South Africa's Cape Town chairperson, Rikus Erasmus, said that if it hadn't been for Bell's "vast experience", the outcome might have been very different.
He said the plane was flying quite low when suddenly the engine caught fire. Bell had "seconds to make a decision" since he was so close to the ground and, having avoided houses and skimming trees, rounded a bend bound for one of the longer fairways on the course. The plane had made a "good" forced landing.
There are nine Harvard planes, which Erasmus said had been declared "national monuments". Two of them are hangared at the Stellenbosch airfield.