Drivers in Florida were shocked to see a light aircraft crash into the road right next to them when the pilot ran out of fuel.
Remy Colin escaped with only a minor head injury when he was forced to make an emergency landing on a busy street in Orlando, and fortunately no one else was hurt in the incident. But the plane’s proximity to cars and power lines meant that that if he had descended a few feet to the left or right things could have been very different.
A video shot by an occupant of a car heading up University Boulevard shows the plane heading towards them, but above the lanes taking traffic in the opposite direction. It drops rapidly, leaning to the right at the last second before crashing into the ground on the sidewalk in front of a private residence.
“I misjudged my fuel,” Colin told NBC News, freely admitting that the accident was his fault. “I ran out of fuel so I let it stall because it seemed the best thing to do was to just fall straight out of the sky, and in doing so I slowed the airplane down.”
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Colin says he is cooperating with aviation authorities, but an aviation expert told NBC News that the pilot could face the suspension of his license.
This accident comes off the back of two more light aircraft emergency landings on public roads we’ve written about in the last six weeks. In the first, a pilot in North Carolina managed to set his airplane down without causing damage or injuries on a mercifully fairly empty Highway 74, but the plane in the second story wasn’t so lucky.
The pilot in that incident was forced to ditch his Piper PA-32 on a packed Californian highway and clipped a car on his descent, causing the plane to spin out and burst into flames after spilling aviation fuel across the road. Fortunately the pilot and the drivers in the surrounding cars weren’t hurt.