Photo by Timothy Frudd A two-person glider crashed Saturday afternoon in the village of Mayville. The pilot and a passenger suffered only minor injuries.

MAYVILLE — A two-person glider crashed into the bushes and trees across from Chautauqua Lake Central School around 1:20 p.m. on Saturday.

According to the pilots, the glider that was launched from Dart Airport in Hartfield, had lost altitude and was attempting to make an emergency landing.

Eyewitnesses said they watched the whole event happen and were able to immediately help the two men out of the glider. The Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office later identified the pilot as Galo A Grijalva, 56, of Lakewood and Douglas R Sillart, 60, of Derby.

“We were just coming this way past the school, and right before Harrington’s we saw the plane coming low,” Dustin Lang, an eyewitness said. “They came almost over this house and turned around. I thought they were going to try landing on the road, I don’t know if they went that way because they saw us and didn’t want to hit the truck, but they just went off into the weeds.”

Lang said by the time he reached the plane, the first of the two men had already emerged from the wreckage.

“By the time I got over there, the first guy was already out of the plane,” he said.

The glider’s sudden crash was also witnessed by a teacher from Chautauqua Lake Central School.

“I was heading to my school to go to my classroom, when I saw a glider coming across, and all of a sudden the glider started going down. It crashed into a bushy small tree area and split apart.” the teacher said. “It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.”

A local pastor also watched the event unfold.

“I saw the glider going very low across the main road towards Hartfield, so I thought at first that it was just going to land at the Hartfield airport,” he said. “It banked left and came back towards the main road, then it went back towards the right like it was going to try to land in the Harrington’s field.”

After the glider crashed, the eyewitness said he was able to climb down into the brush and provide aid alongside Dustin Lang.

“We went back to the crash site and there was a gentleman already out of his truck down in the ditch helping,” he said. “So I went down into the brush and the plane was in pieces, except for the cockpit part. The wing was up in the tree.”

The pastor said the first man to emerge from the glider had blood on his face.

By pulling the seats forward in the cockpit, the eyewitnesses were also able to help the other man out.

“I asked if they were OK, and they both said that they were OK,” the pastor said. “They could communicate, and they could walk. When we took the one guy out, he had a really bad cut on the top of his head. They both said they had lost altitude, they didn’t say why, but they were trying to make an emergency landing and they couldn’t get it turned enough to make it over those little trees in the field.”

The pastor said the glider was close to making a successful emergency landing in the field, but could not fly over the trees near the field.

“If they had made it another 10 feet, they would have been fine, but they couldn’t make it over those trees,” he said.

The men were able to walk out of the wreckage by the time emergency responders arrived.

The accident remains under investigation by the Sheriff’s Office and Federal Aviation Administration.