An accident-prone amateur flyer who is attempting to go around the world in a 65-year-old aircraft once used by General George Patton has crash-landed in the Caribbean.

Maurice Kirk, 62, a retired veterinary surgeon, issued a mayday call on Saturday before his plane went down about 80 miles from the nearest land.

He was rescued after coastguards picked up signals from his emergency beacon and was taken to hospital on the island of Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands but discharged himself after being treated for head and neck injuries. Yesterday he was believed to be attempting to organise a rescue mission to salvage the stricken aircraft before it sinks.

Only nine days ago, Mr Kirk was the victim of a street mugging in Cuba.

He owns a practice in South Wales although he was struck off by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 2002 for “disgraceful conduct”, the result of 11 convictions including assault. He is a former drinking partner of Oliver Reed, the late actor.

Mr Kirk began his round-the-world odyssey when he competed in the 2001 London-to-Sydney air race. Since then, he has already had his 1943 Piper Cub aircraft rebuilt after crashing it in Japan in 2005.

With unusual aforethought Mr Kirk had the aircraft, which was once used to ferry the American general around the battlefields of Normandy, coated in shark-repelling paint.

Upon being told that her husband had signed himself out of hospital, Mr Kirk’s wife, Kirsty, 48, said: “He usually does.” She added: “He has phoned me briefly to say he’s OK but a bit battered about the head and neck. He has borrowed clothes but he has no money and everything is inside the plane. His computer and all his belongings are on it. It is a race against time because it will sink.

“He told me he had about 12 hours to reach it.”

Mr Kirk, from Llantwit Major in the Vale of Glamorgan, flew out to the United States on January 22 after the plane, called Liberty Girl, had been restored there. He had spent six weeks flying around the Caribbean.The father of four was flying from the Dominican Republic to the Turks and Caicos when the engine on his two-seater aircraft failed.

He performed a controlled landing in the sea and his emergency beacon was picked up by coastguards in Miami and New Zealand, where the beacon is registered.

Mrs Kirk was at home with their eight-year-old daughter, Genevieve, when she had a call from the New Zealand authorities informing her that her husband’s plane had ditched.

She said: “I was warned that the outcome of these things is usually not very good but I told them my husband is indestructible. He’s crashed before and had all sorts of bother. He always seems to survive.

“Sure enough, I soon had a phone call saying he was all right.”

Mrs Kirk was calling flying clubs and contacts in America yesterday in the hope that someone could help her husband to retrieve his stricken plane.

A spokesman for the US Coastguard said that Mr Kirk was picked up by helicopter after being tracked by an emergency radio beacon. Nick Ameen, a coastguard petty officer in Miami, said: “It may well have saved his life.

“It was lucky he had that beacon on him. That was a really good decision on his part.”

The Piper Cub is capable of taking off and landing on grass strips as short as 200ft but it is is handicapped by its top speed of 65mph (104km/h).

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