Imagine driving home during rush hour, coming up to a crowded intersection, and seeing this.
Dashboard camera footage shows the moment a Piper PA-28 Cherokee aircraft is forced to make an emergency landing on a street in Orange County, California Wednesday night – and at 6:18 p.m., it just so happened to be right in the middle of rush hour.
“Are you kidding me?” the unidentified driver says as the plane rolls through the intersection of Red Hill and McGaw avenues at high speed.
Luckily the pilot had a green light as he barreled through the intersection, and the other Orange County drivers react with seemingly normalcy to the sudden aerial arrival, continuing the flow of traffic as normal.
The emergency landing occurred near John Wayne Airport, where the aircraft is based and was attempting to return to when it encountered an unknown technical problem which caused the plane’s engine to fail.
At that point, the flight instructor took over the control but was unable to return to the airport and had to make an emergency landing on the roadway.
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The plane is owned by Orange Coast College Flight School, and was on a training flight with a first-time pilot when the emergency landing occurred.
Daniel Shrader, the Dean of Technology at Orange Coast College, confirmed to Global News that no one was injured and no property was damaged in the emergency landing.
“We’re calling it the Miracle on Red Hill,” Shrader said.
The scene in the video gets even more surreal as the driver with the dashcam turns right and follows in the path of the aircraft. Other drivers calmly signal and change lanes to avoid the plane, which has come to a stop in the rightmost lane.
“People say we don’t drive well in California, but we have other things to contend with!” Shrader joked.
You don’t expect to see a plane land on the street in front of you every day,” Rudy de Leon, who was on Red Hill at the time, told Coast Report Online. “It was crazy watching the fire trucks and police officers swarm to the scene after the plane had landed.”
It is still not clear what caused the technical malfunction at this time. The identity of both the student pilot and the instructor are being withheld.
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