© Frank Palfreyman/European Pressphoto AgencyA pair of children on the Ferris wheel and two people in the plane were trapped, but there were no serious injuries.
Sydney - A small plane smashed into a Ferris wheel at a festival north of Sydney on Saturday, trapping a pair of children on the ride and two people in the aircraft, which dangled from the top of the ride for hours.
The crash brought an early end to the day's festivities, but it caused no serious injuries.
The plane, a superlight Cheetah S200 carrying two passengers, crashed into the carnival ride amid poor weather on the first morning of an annual two-day festival in the town of Old Bar, about 220 miles north of Sydney on Australia's eastern coast, local media reported.
Two children, ages 9 and 13, were trapped in a compartment close to the point of impact for about 90 minutes, the local police said. The plane's pilot and passenger were also stuck inside the battered aircraft, which was tangled in the giant wheel and suspended more than 30 feet in the air for almost three hours, the police said.
The pilot, Paul Cox, 53, said he had not seen the Ferris wheel before his plane collided with it.
"The next thing I knew, I was stopped inside the Ferris wheel," he told The Associated Press. "I had no idea for a few minutes, and I was just hoping no one got hurt."
The plane had taken off from a nearby airfield before the pilot became disoriented because of poor visibility.
The authorities credited the bad weather with keeping more children from the ride, which had been packed earlier in the day.
"Thankfully, everyone was taken down and were able to walk away from it," the spokesman for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Ben Shepherd, told The A.P.
Gary Jones, a local resident, said his twin 9-year-old boys had gotten off the ride just seconds before the crash, The A.P. reported. "It was a hell of a shock," he said.
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