Sid Clark, 47, needed hospital treatment after crash-landing his Cessna plane into conifer trees in an elderly couple's back garden in thick fog on Saturday.He was quizzed about cultivating cannabis after 300 plants were found during the police raid on Tuesday evening.Mr Clark has now been released on bail for further investigation.He had taken friend Tim Des Vignes, who was released from prison for a day nearing the end of a sentence for cocaine smuggling, for a flight when it narrowly missed the couple's home in Lyminge in thick fog.Mr Clark's arrest came after he confessed to Yourmaidstone on Tuesday morning that he was a former heroin addict who had enjoyed the high life in a variety of Asian countries - including Thailand and China.He openly spoke of his past at his luxury four-bedroom home in Barming.But the pilot denied that he had been taking Des Vignes, 53, on a drugs pick-up.He said: “We had a full tank of petrol - but we weren’t going to Europe.“We would have had to submit a detailed flight plan to do that and if we landed in somewhere like Holland we would have been arrested for making an illegal flight.“I would never have taken that risk.“Police have got my log book - they can see I was on a local flight.”The father-of-one revealed he planned to take his friend - who was finishing an eight-stretch at cushy open jail Blantyre House in nearby Goudhurst - for a pleasure flight to give him a “treat”.
But the pair quickly hit dense fog when they took off from Rochester Airport to fly to Dover and back.He said: “It was very cloudy and my instruments were giving me a false reading. I was a lot lower to the ground than I thought. It was then I saw the trees and we just went straight into them.“We were lucky we cleared the house. We were both hurt although lucky not to have been seriously injured. I feel traumatised now - I don’t think I can face flying again for a month.”Mr Clark learnt to fly while doing “coastal trips” in Thailand eight years ago.He then moved back to Britain where he applied for his national pilot’s licence, the NPPL, at Blackbushe airport near Camberley in Surrey.He said: “It’s great in Thailand - you don’t need a licence to fly. So when I got back it was really easy to get qualified because I already had a lot of experience.”
But the pair quickly hit dense fog when they took off from Rochester Airport to fly to Dover and back.He said: “It was very cloudy and my instruments were giving me a false reading. I was a lot lower to the ground than I thought. It was then I saw the trees and we just went straight into them.“We were lucky we cleared the house. We were both hurt although lucky not to have been seriously injured. I feel traumatised now - I don’t think I can face flying again for a month.”Mr Clark learnt to fly while doing “coastal trips” in Thailand eight years ago.He then moved back to Britain where he applied for his national pilot’s licence, the NPPL, at Blackbushe airport near Camberley in Surrey.He said: “It’s great in Thailand - you don’t need a licence to fly. So when I got back it was really easy to get qualified because I already had a lot of experience.”
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