CLERMONT, N.Y. -- A plane flips over during a crash landing, and amazingly the pilot walks away unharmed.  Mechanical problems caused the single engine plane to lose power over a Columbia County farm field.

NEWS10's Marie Luby explains how the pilot's skill, and a lot of luck, saved his life.

Imagine if your plane landed upside down.  "The nose gear collapsed and allowed the plane to tip over on its back," explains Charles Webber, who runs a nearby flying service.

Webber was five minutes from the Clermont field and one of the first to fly over the scene.  "It's a gut wrenching thing," Webber says, any time he hears about a plane going down in the area.  "For us, it's usually somebody you know."

The pilot, 50-year-old Jay Dean Morrissett, was able to walk away.  His upside down aircraft - not so lucky.  Early reports indicated it simply ran out of gas. The FAA will investigate the exact cause of the crash Thursday morning.

Webber says Morrissett must have known what he was doing, saying, "We've had a few mishaps, and when your engine quits up there, it's time to take care of business and come in contact with the ground as slow as possible.  That's the key."

New York State Police Sgt. Michael Comerford says, "Small plane crashes generally don't work out with just a couple little scrapes, and that's all he had, Mr. Morrissett, so he's very lucky."

Luckier still, because of the timing.  Morrissett had just bought the plane in New Hampshire and was flying home to Virginia.  If he'd flown five minutes farther, Webber says the landing in the farm field wouldn't have been possible.

Webber explains, "He was just about out of agricultural area if you will, and then he would have been over forest and apple orchard and things of that nature, so he really kind of got lucky if you will, that it happened where it did."

It's definitely not the ideal way to land your new plane, but as Webber puts it: "Any landing you can walk away from is a good one."