The Feds Investigate Harrison Ford

The aviation enthusiast apparently misheard a control-tower message
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 29, 2020 4:49 PM CDT
Harrison Ford on Runway: 'I'm Terribly Sorry'
Actor Harrison Ford answers questions during a press event to promote his new film, "The Call of the Wild," in Mexico City, Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2020.   (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

"You know, sometimes I amaze even myself." Han Solo's iconic line didn't quite apply Friday when Harrison Ford flirted with disaster on a Southern California runway, the Daily News reports. The 77-year-old actor apparently misheard the control tower operator at Hawthorne Airport and crossed a runway in his two-seater rather than wait for another pilot to take off and land. "Get across that runway now! I told you to hold short! You need to listen up," the operator says in an audio recording posted by TMZ. Ford was anything but arrogant in his response: "Excuse me, sir, I thought exactly the opposite," he says. "I'm terribly sorry."

TMZ saw no actual risk—the other plane was over 3,000 feet away from Ford's Aviat A-1C Husky—but the FAA is still looking into it. "The FAA is investigating an incident in which the pilot of an Aviat Husky taxied across the runway at Hawthorne Municipal Airport Friday afternoon while another aircraft was performing a touch-and-go landing," says an FAA rep, per CNN. Ford has run into trouble before: The aviator wrongly landed on a taxiway at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif., in 2017 (and called himself a "schmuck") and made an emergency landing on a SoCal golf course in 2015 after experiencing engine failure, per the Hollywood Reporter. (More Harrison Ford stories.)

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