It was about 5:15 p.m. Friday and Jonathan Witman was eating dinner in his family’s home, a sprawling cabin that overlooks the Susquehanna River just outside Middletown, nestled in the area between Harrisburg International Airport and Three Mile Island.

His dinner was interrupted by knocking on the door. It was neighbor woman and her daughter, frantically telling him that they had seen a plane go down in the river. The woman and her daughter were out for a walk and hadn’t taken their cell phones with them so they needed Witman to call 911.

Witman heard the fire department’s sirens in the background and concluded that someone had already reported the crash.

He ran down to the river, where his boat was moored. Glancing at the plane, sitting in the shallow water, he said he thought, at first, that it was a float plane. “There’s a guy who has a float plane and he puts down in there,” he said.

Witman jumped in the small fishing boat, fired up the outboard and began navigating the shallow water to the aircraft, a small, single-engine plane.

It was about 600 yards out, in the middle of the river. The river was running low and he knew to avoid the sandbars and rocks that lurked just below the placid surface. His family has lived on the river since 2004 and before then, his parents had a cabin on an island that split the river into two streams at that point. He knows that stretch of water better than most, spending a lot of time on the river.

He had previously rescued people who run aground in the shallows, he said, the boaters “doing jumping jacks” to signal for help. That stretch of water, when the river’s running low, as it has been, is so shallow, he said, “you could walk out there and not get your shorts wet.”

He had never had the opportunity to rescue a pilot and passenger in a small plane.

“It was pretty crazy,” he said.

'You put it down easy'

Witman arrived before the Middletown Volunteer Fire Company's water rescue crew, which had gotten hung up on a sandbar between the boat launch to the north and the site of the crash.

As Witman approached the plane, he saw two people, a man and a woman, on the wing, the woman kneeling and leaning against the fuselage and the man standing nearby.

They appeared uninjured, he said.

He asked if they were OK. They said they were.

He asked, “What happened?”

The man, who apparently was the pilot, told him that his engine cut out and he had “put it down” in the river, Witman said.

“You put it down easy,” Witman told him.

The plane was intact and so was the couple aboard it.

He helped the woman onto his boat and the man handed him her luggage. By then, Witman said, the river rescue crew had arrived, and the man boarded its boat.

According to media reports, one of the occupants of the plane was taken to Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center for treatment of what appeared to be minor injuries. The couple's identities were not released.

WATCH:Raw footage: Man who helped survivors of plane crash into river shares video

Plane was flying from Rochester to HIA

The plane, a Piper PA-46 Malibu, a single-engine craft with a five-passenger capacity, was inbound to Harrisburg International from Rochester, N.Y., officials reported. It is registered to Barjack Aviation in Islamorada, Florida, according to flight records. It crashed an hour and five minutes into the flight, just short of its destination, according to flight records.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating the cause of the crash, and the Susquehanna Area Regional Airport Authority, which operates HIA, were still determining how to get the plane out of the river, according to reports.

Witman speculated that they would have to use a helicopter to lift it out since the water is too shallow to accommodate a barge fitted with a crane.

Saturday morning, Witman was still amazed that the plane had landed so softly in the river. The 26-year-old has seen some strange sights on the water.

“A couple over that way has a hovercraft and that’s pretty strange,” he said. “But this is my first plane.”

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Also of interest, see a rescue demonstration over the river: