ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, December 12, 1996            TAG: 9612120044
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: A-1  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER

STUDENT PASSES 1ST CRASH COURSE

Dwight Holland spends a lot of time thinking about the challenges of traversing outer space, but Tuesday he was having problems with travels a little closer to home.

Holland, a doctoral student and researcher at Virginia Tech who specializes in the study of how humans can cope with long-distance space flights, walked away uninjured Tuesday after crash-landing his single-engine airplane in a stand of hardwood trees near an airport in Chamblee, Ga.

The rented plane, which had taken off from Roanoke Regional Airport, landed about 10:30 p.m., wedged in the treetops of a narrow patch of woods. Firefighters used a Georgia Power cherry picker to pull Holland from the cockpit.

"We're not sure exactly what happened," Holland, 36, said Wednesday from his parents' home in Roanoke County. He declined to talk further, because he had just arrived home on a commercial flight and had not had any sleep since the crash.

Holland has considerable experience in the air. In 1984, while a graduate student at Virginia Tech, he spent three months shuttling researchers around Antarctica on a twin-engine Otter aircraft as a technical engineer and field geophysicist for the U.S. Antarctic Research Program. He was in Antarctica during the discovery of the Mars meteorite, which is believed to hold the first signs of extraterrestrial life.

At the time of Tuesday's crash, he was approaching Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, where he planned to pick up a friend.

"I think the engine just quit on him," said his father, James Holland. "He's a good pilot. I don't think he had much choice as to where to put it down."

Federal Aviation Administration investigators have not determined a cause for the crash.

LENGTH: Short :   45 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. Rescuers use a cherry picker to pull a Virginia Tech
          doctoral student from the cockpit after his plane crashed into a 
          tree Tuesday night in Georgia. color.