When you're a Race Director, you quickly learn to expect the unexpected. 

What Rich Schaefer, NHRA Division 2 Director, experienced last Sunday broke new ground in his experiences during the divisional event at South Georgia Motorsports Park, located outside of Valdosta, Ga. 

Top Dragster racer Casey Spradlin, after winning the Top Dragster title, left fluid on the track necessitating a clean-up. The clean-up crew was busy grooming the track when all of a sudden, without warning, what appeared to be a Cessna prop plan dropped out of the sky, and landed in the shutdown area. A surprised crew, including Schaefer, could only watch in astonishment, as the errant plane taxied in proximity to the support vehicles, made a u-turn and then took off. 

"That was definitely a first," Schaefer said. "I mean, that was, I can’t think of anything more interesting than that." 

Schaefer witnessed the incident, and could not believe his eyes. 

"I thought the guys were joking at first," Schaefer admitted. "I banter with the guys on safety quite a bit, and next thing you know one of them is telling me there’s an airplane coming down track, and I thought he was talking about me because I was riding on a scooter heading down towards the starting line. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. And then finally I turned around and saw the plane landing. I thought, ‘You know, I should probably get over the wall." 

Schaefer said he contacted the FAA and NTSB to report the incident, something he probably wouldn't have done if the pilot hadn't returned to the sky in haste.

"Honestly, if he would have just stopped, we probably would have had a good laugh about it and just let it go," Schaefer said. "But when he intentionally swerved around one of the safety trucks to take off again, that made it to where we couldn’t just turn our head on it. Something was wrong and we felt like we had to turn it in."

Schaefer confirmed he did get the plane's identification numbers, and they used those numbers to gain identity and importantly flight plan information.  

"I thought maybe he just mistook the drag strip for a local airport there in Valdosta, and he was just stopping to fuel up or something," Schafer said. "But we looked at his flight records and we know he stopped in Chattanooga to fill up, so he wouldn’t have needed more fuel in a 1974 Cessna until he got to Orlando. Which as far as we can tell was his final destination. So that fact that he was attempting to land in South Georgia made no sense whatsoever. The flight pattern after he took off from the drag strip didn’t make any sense either." 

As Schaefer will attest, this was just another unexpected incident, although the oddest he's experienced either on or off the record.