A wild scene just outside of Seattle, Washington was captured on video thanks to a state trooper’s dashcam video. On Thursday, August 1, an airplane was forced into an emergency landing and the pilot was able to land the plane on the highway.
A fuel system malfunction led to the emergency landing and luckily no one was injured.
Washington State Trooper Clint Thompson saw the plane coming towards the highway and used his patrol car’s lights to slow down traffic. The plane eventually landed in a gap between vehicles and was able to come rolling to a stop at a red light alongside traffic.
“Trooper Thompson just happened to be in the right place at the right time and witnessed the plane make an emergency landing,” Washington State Patrol spokeswoman Johnna Batiste said in a statement, via CNN.com.
The full dashcam video can be seen below:
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The pilot, David Acklam, expressed his thanks to Trooper Thompson for assisting him in the emergency landing.
“I would like to thank the trooper for what he did. [Thompson] probably saved me from serious injury or death and somebody else from getting in a car crash with the plane,”
“It’s a good day to be alive,” Acklam said via KOMO News.
“It’s a good day to be alive.”
Acklam saw the empty stretch of highway and knew he had to make the landing, so he took his shot.
“He (the pilot) could see the straight stretch of roadway, and he knew he had to make an emergency landing, and he was able to do so safely,” Johnna Batiste of the Washington State Patrol said. “It was a series of very lucky events. There happened to be a break in traffic and the plane did not come into contact with any vehicles or pedestrians.”
Acklam eventually jumped out of the plane — which was a KR2 single-propeller plane — after it came to a stop at the red light and was able to pull it off of the side of the road with the help of Thompson. It’s a good thing everyone was on high alert and paying attention when the plane came swooping onto the road.
