Onlookers survey a plane that crashed in the parking lot at Grinnell’s Beach, in Tiverton, yesterday afternoon. The plane was returning to Berkley, Mass., when its engine failed.

Special to the Journal / Lori Cashman

TIVERTON –– Keith Williams and his friend Lori Cashman were just sitting down to a meal of General Tso’s chicken, beef teriyaki, crab Rangoon and french fries at Grinnell’s Beach when he saw the plane approaching.

Dipping lower and lower in the late afternoon sky, the aircraft didn’t look quite right. It was too close to the ground.

But Williams, 26, of Fall River, figured there must be a reason for the descent.

“I’m not from here, so I thought, maybe there’s an airport,” he said.

But there was no airport.

In moments, the small single-engine plane –– a Team Mini Max 1500R –– was bouncing off an abandoned bridge and crashing into the parking lot at the beach, along the Sakonnet River, clipping a car as it settled.

Cashman, 38, did not see the collision. And when she turned, she thought she was looking at the aftermath of a car crash.

“When I was halfway across the parking lot, I realized it was a plane,” she said.

When she arrived, there was no one in the red, open-cockpit aircraft with the skull-and-crossbones logo on the tail.

“I’m right here,” the pilot said, standing off to the side.

He had just a few scratches and bruises. And the elderly couple in the car were just fine.

James J. Warcup, an aeronautics inspector with the Rhode Island Airport Corporation who came to the crash scene, declined to name the pilot.

Federal Aviation Administration records show the plane, built from a kit, is registered to Ronald Tetrault Sr., of Tiverton.

Warcup said the pilot flew south from an airport in Berkley, Mass., where the plane is stored, to Sakonnet Point in Little Compton on a pleasure trip.

The pilot had turned north and was headed back to Berkley, Warcup said, when his engine failed around 5 p.m.

Warcup said the pilot, who cooperated with the initial investigation, targeted the Sakonnet River for a landing to avoid populated areas.

Then, when he spotted the abandoned bridge, the pilot attempted to land on the concrete strip.

The plane bounced and the landing gear caught the edge of the bridge, tumbling the aircraft into the parking lot, Warcup said.

The Tiverton police and fire departments, the state police and the state Department of Environmental Management responded, along with the Rhode Island Airport Corporation.

Warcup said there was a small fuel spill that was contained before it could make its way toward the water.

Holly Baker, a spokeswoman for the FAA, provided some basic information on the plane and said the accident is under investigation.

Warcup said federal authorities allowed the pilot to haul the plane away. FAA investigators will pull the aircraft apart as soon as today, he said, in an attempt to determine the cause of the engine failure.

He said the pilot did not break any rules in the course of the flight, cruising at the required elevation of 1,000 feet before the failure.

And the fate of that Chinese dinner, interrupted?

Cashman said she only had a couple of bites afterward. She was a bit rattled.

It’s not every day, she said, that you see a plane crash.

dscharfe@projo.com