Watch An Airplane Crash Land On A Busy California Freeway

It’s an overused movie trope, but planes landing on freeways occasionally happen.

Somehow, this Cessna single-engine plane crash-landed on the busy 91 freeway in Corona, California, at around 12:30 pm without injuring anyone. Incredibly, nobody was hurt because the landing was hard enough to rupture the Cessna’s fuel tanks, spreading fuel that combusted in flames across the lanes.

As the plane crumpled and swerved, a wing caught the back corner of a Toyota Tundra carrying three people. Of all the vehicles to hit, it was lucky the plane connected with a heavy passenger truck rather than a small car. Being hit by the wing of an aircraft on a freeway is not covered in car safety testing.

According to the pilot of the small Cessna, Andrew Cho, the plane’s engine failed and was losing altitude too fast to reach an airport, making the interstate the next option. In the movies and on TV, the hero often opts for a nearby field so as not to risk more than the lives of the people in the plane.

We’re not aviation experts, but we know real life isn’t like the movies, and we can’t judge Cho’s actions. What we do know, and can see from the video above, is that Cho managed to find a large enough gap in the middle of an infamously crowded California freeway to land a plane. And he did so in the middle of the day.

We know this piece of the 91 highway well and realize a lot of luck and skill came together here. Luck found a gap large enough to merge a plane into. And Cho obviously had the required skill to drop into it with no throttle to rely on for power.

In a news report by KTLA, Cho says the landing was a “hard bump,” which sounds like an understatement of the century if you look at the dashcam footage below. The plane slid across the lanesand into the wall of a freeway ramp, another piece of luck as the fire could have ignited the dry vegetation before and after the ramp.

According to KTLA, the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the crash.