A small plane was able to safely land along a Bay Area freeway Monday morning during rush hour, and no cars were hit and no one was injured.
It had the makings of a disaster Monday when a small, single-engine plane had to make an emergency landing on a roadway in Cupertino.
The plane made its landing around 7 am on southbound Highway 85 just south of Stevens Creek Boulevard, as the CHP reported on Xitter. The pilot was able to land the 14-foot plane along the shoulder of the freeway — landing head-on into traffic — and avoided clipping any passing cars.
TRAFFIC ALERT: Just after 7AM, a small plane landed on SR-85 SB SO Stevens Creek. Nobody was injured. The two left lanes are currently open and personnel is on scene working to clear the right lanes. pic.twitter.com/8iUfxZsM48
— CHP San Jose (@CHPSanJose) November 4, 2024
As KTVU reports, via Brooks Jarosz, a spokesperson for the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, the pilot had run out of gas and had to bring down the plane on a roadway.
The two right-hand lanes of southbound 85 were closed after 7 am as emergency crews arrived and as a tow truck came to remove the plane, per KTVU.
According to the FAA, the plane is a single-engine CubCrafters CC11, and had just the pilot onboard.
Update: The pilot, Peterson Conway, spoke to ABC 7 and explained exactly what happened. Conway regularly commutes from a farm in Carmel by plane to Palo Alto, and he says he called ahead Monday morning to his airport in Carmel to "top off" his gas tank, but that may not have happened.
"I started to lose my engine, made a mayday call into the Palo Alto airport, my destination," Conway tells the station. They tried to divert him to Minetta San Jose Airport, but he knew he couldn't make it there, so he started aiming for some football fields.
"I then saw kids out in the football field I was trying to make and I couldn't make that. Northbound traffic on 85 was back-to-back and nobody would be able to see me coming down on top of them so I opted to land on the southbound lane."
Conway explains his landing, heading into oncoming traffic: "I turned on all of my lights, the cars started to separate, there were a couple of high-speed Porsche SUVs heading my way playing chicken and I was rocking my wings to try and get everyone's attention and I had to put it down," he said. "Stuck the landing, I mean that's what these planes are made for."
