British Pilot on Round-the-World Trip Crashes in Japan

TOKYO (AP) - A former Welsh veterinarian on a round-the-world trip was slightly injured when his light airplane crashed in northwestern Japan Friday, police and hospital officials said.

According to diary entries on his Web site, the former veterinarian from Cardiff, Wales, was in Japan as part of an extended round-the-world trip in a World War II military plane.

He flew from London to Sydney in a 2001 air race, and from there traveled through Indochina to the Korean Peninsula, then Russia, before arriving in Japan in early October, the Web site said.

"It is gone 3 in the morning now and I fly to Niigata, on the west coast of Honshu Island, at 9, en route to Hiroshima, devastated just a few months after I was born,'' Kirk wrote in his final entry, dated Oct. 18 from Hokkaido in northern Japan.

He planned to fly to Alaska from Japan and hoped "to see the Americans before Christmas,'' the entry said.

Kazunobu Nishide, an official at Kanazawa Medical Center where Kirk was hospitalized, said the Welshman had his foot in a cast and found it difficult to walk. He was being questioned by police about the accident, Nishide said.

Kirk's aircraft was badly damaged after hitting a small truck and several construction machines at the construction site, but nobody on the ground was hurt, according to police.

Kyodo News agency quoted local policemen as saying Kirk apologized for the crash. The Briton told police he was relieved his plane did not hit any children, Kyodo said.

This was not the first time the former veterinarian has been in trouble with the police.

Kirk was stripped of his vet license in 2002 following 11 criminal offenses, including bodily harm, assaulting two police officers, and flying an aircraft while under the influence of alcohol, according to a decision document released in 2004 by a disciplinary committee of Britain's Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.

Though Kirk had been a dedicated animal doctor - often flying to reach sick animals - he "could be abrasive with animal owners and abusive - sometimes violent,'' according to the document, which rejected Kirk's appeal of the 2002 decision.