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A family in south suburban Lynwood made a surprising discovery Saturday night when they returned home and found a helicopter wheel hanging from the ceiling of their bathroom.

Linda Dian, 55, said she returned just before 7 p.m. to her two-story, single-family home at 20019 Marlin Court and was watching TV when her daughter began yelling upstairs.

“She started screaming, ‘momma, momma come here now,’” Dian said. “I was scared. I thought something had happened to one of my grandkids.”

What she found upstairs stunned her — a small wheel that looked like it was from an airplane poking through the ceiling of the bathroom.

“I saw the wheel hanging in the ceiling of my bathroom. There was plaster everywhere,” Dian said.


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She said the wheel must have struck the home while they were out earlier in the evening. None of the neighbors she had talked to Saturday night said they heard anything.

A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the part appeared to be a dolly wheel assembly from a helicopter. The agency was still working to determine when and from which aircraft the part fell from Saturday night.

Dian, who lives blocks away from Lansing Municipal Airport, said she had long feared something like this would happen to her home.

“I am so scared and nervous right now,” Dian said. “I’ve been dreading this. I’ve always had a fear for a plane hitting the house. What if it had been later in the night?”

A spokesperson for the airport did not respond to a request for comment Saturday night.

Dian called the police and a crew from the Lynwood Fire Department was sent to the home. Firefighters pushed the wheel back out through the roof and carried it away.

“They’re just trying to figure out who this belongs to at this point,” Dian said. “I’m so thankful no one was hurt.”

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“I am so scared and nervous right now,” Dian said. “I’ve been dreading this. I’ve always had a fear for a plane hitting the house

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When the owner of a helicopter flight school read a newspaper article about a helicopter wheel that became lodged halfway between the roof and bathroom ceiling of a Lynwood home this weekend, she quickly realized what happened to a missing ground-handling wheel.

But it’s anyone’s guess as to who was more shocked about the “unfortunate incident," the homeowner, Linda Taylor-Whitt, or Amy Summers of SummerSkyz Inc., of Lansing.

Taylor-Whitt said she was grateful to receive a call and an apology Monday from Summers. The call not only eased her financial concerns by providing the company’s insurance information, but also solved the mystery of how a helicopter wheel ended up in her roof, about a mile from Lansing Municipal Airport.

“I’m glad they reached out and we have an idea now of what happened because up until then we were in the dark about where it came from.” Taylor-Whitt said.

Taylor-Whitt and her family had been out for an early dinner Saturday, celebrating her oldest daughter’s birthday, when they believe the wheel crashed through the roof. When they returned home to the 20000 block of Marlin Court another daughter went upstairs and heard an unfamiliar noise, eventually locating the source in the bathroom.


“She went into my washroom and when she looked up she saw a wheel coming through my washroom ceiling. There was plaster everywhere, and the noise I guess was water coming in because it was raining,” Taylor-Whitt said. “She started screaming for me to run upstairs and I didn’t know what was going on.”

Taylor-Whitt, who said she has a bad leg, took a while to climb the stairs, never expecting what she saw when she made it to her bathroom.

“To have a helicopter wheel coming through the ceiling? I mean I didn’t know what kind of wheel it was at first, I guessed it was an airplane wheel. Hysteria went through me,” she said.

Living so close to the airport she said she had certainly thought about the worst-case scenario.

“The whole time I’ve been in the house I’ve always thought disaster could strike," she said.

"I am glad, thank you Lord, that it was a wheel instead of a plane because it could’ve been so bad,” she said.

No one was injured and Taylor-Whitt said when police arrived, one officer told her he’d never seen anything like it. The fire chief said it was something he equates more with a scene from a TV show than real life.

Some of the emergency crew members asked if they could go onto the roof to try to pull it out, but they felt like they were damaging her roof more that way and pushed it in through the ceiling, she said. Someone looked it up and told her they believed it was from a helicopter.

Taylor-Whitt said she called a contractor to address the hole in her roof, and he came out Saturday night to do an inspection and cover the area with tarps. She hasn’t yet heard what the repairs are expected to cost.

Summers explained the wheels aren’t left on aircraft while they’re in flight, but rather used to move a helicopter from one hangar to another. She said the flight instructor manning the aircraft that day recently joined the company and wasn’t previously responsible for moving helicopters on the ground.

“It’s kind of new to him,” she said. “The pilot is not used to having to use those wheels because at the school he was at before, (others) did all the ground handling.”

Summers said nothing like this has ever happened before with their fleet, which their website says includes six helicopters.

In addition to contacting the homeowner the school has reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration, Summers said.

“It’s an unfortunate incident and we’ve been in contact with the FAA and followed all appropriate procedures,” she said.

[email protected]

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