A light plane that ran into trouble over Australia's Blue Mountains has made a near-perfect landing - on the end of a parachute.

The pilot of the Cirrus aircraft deployed the parachute that is fitted to that make of plane and drifted down into the front garden of a house.

If the aircraft had not been carrying a parachute, police and flying experts agreed that the result could have been tragic.

The pilot and his two passengers received only minor injuries after the unusual landing - witnessed by open-mouthed residents of the small town of Lawson.

Resident Robert Ross, who stared in astonishment at the sight of an aircraft coming towards him on the end of a parachute, said he had at first heard the engine splutter.

"He got it going again and then it went dead," he told the Herald Sun newspaper.

"It then started to go into a spiral. I thought the pilot was going to eject, but it all happened too quick."

"I started yelling out to my wife 'There's a plane going to crash into the house'."

The aircraft's sudden descent was halted at around 4,000ft, however, when a huge parachute, with orange stripes, suddenly appeared above it and it drifted down about 400 yards from Mr Ross's home.

Cirrus light planes have a handle in the cockpit which, when pulled, removes a cover plate and deploys a parachute.

Mr Allan Bligh, president of the Sydney Flying Club, told the paper that there were about 200 registered Cirrus planes in Australia, but a number of manufacturers decline to use the same parachute system believing a forced controlled landing should be carried out.

"You are taught from your early days of flying that it is a far better system than the deployment of a parachute."

But Cirrus claims that 85 lives have been saved when pilots or passengers have activated the parachute system.

It is understood the Cirrus SR22, which came down in the Blue Mountains, was a demonstration model, which prompted Sydney radio host Stewart Bocking to comment today: "They were caught in a bit of a dilemma."

"If the plane was being demonstrated, you wouldn't want it known that it developed engine trouble - but you would also want it to be known that you can land safely on the end of a parachute."

A staff member at Regal Air, which sells and carries out maintenance work on the aircraft from its headquarters at Sydney's Bankstown Airport, said that if the passengers "had been in any other aircraft they wouldn't be going home tonight to their families."