A 60-year-old British aviator trying to fly around the world in a 1943 Piper Cub propeller plane crashed in Japan on Friday, damaging his aircraft although he escaped with minor injuries, Reuters reported. Maurice Kirk, a former veterinarian, was flying from the northwestern Japanese prefecture of Niigata to Hiroshima when he was forced into an emergency landing on a highway construction site in Kanazawa, 295 km (184 miles) northwest of Tokyo, and crashed into a truck, police said. Witnesses told Japanese media that construction workers raced to help Kirk out of the plane after the crash, but that he managed to walk from the plane unaided. Police said he was being treated for minor leg injuries. According to the Website address on the side of Kirk's plane, he was three-quarters of the way through a multi-year around-the-world trip in a veteran Piper Cub aircraft that saw service in France during World War Two. The journey began in 2001, when Kirk entered the London to Sydney Air Race. He is now attempting to cross the Pacific to Alaska, but a lack of clearance to enter Russian airspace had stalled him in Japan. According to Kirk's Website, organisers had originally discouraged him from entering the race because his plane lacked adequate range, the most basic of modern navigational instruments and was prone to mechanical failure. There was no immediate word on what caused the crash.
