Pilot heroine halt train and avert disaster
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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.
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