A small plane traveling to Connecticut after taking a tour of the Statue of Liberty made an emergency landing on a New York City interstate highway, startling drivers, but touching down safely with no serious injuries to anyone aboard or on the ground, officials said.
The aircraft, a Piper PA-28, set down at about 3:20pm on Saturday on the northbound side of the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, in an area where the highway passes through Van Cortlandt Park.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said three people were on board. Police and fire officials said neither the male pilot nor two female passengers appeared to have been badly hurt.
Photo: EPA
All were taken to a Bronx hospital for non-life-threatening injuries, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
De Blasio told reporters the plane had departed from Danbury Municipal Airport and was making the return trip when it experienced engine problems.
“We have ... an extraordinary situation and actually a bit of a miracle, thank God, that happened today in our city,” he said, calling the successful highway landing, without any serious injuries or deaths, “amazing.”
“I thought I’d seen everything in my life,” he said.
The FAA said damage to the aircraft was minor.
Photographs taken by bystanders showed blue and white plane largely intact, but resting on its belly by the snowy edge of the road. The plane’s landing gear appeared in the photographs to have collapsed.
A maintenance crew of city Department of Transportation (DOT) workers fixing potholes on the northbound side of the highway noticed the plane in distress heading toward them and stopped traffic, clearing space for the plane to land, a DOT spokesman said.
The DOT crew then helped the plane’s occupants out of the aircraft and inside a heated truck until emergency workers arrived, the spokesman said.
It was not immediately clear what kind of engine problems the plane experienced. A spokeswoman for the FAA said it was investigating, but said the US National Transportation Safety Board would take over the investigation if it was determined the aircraft sustained a significant amount of damage.
There were no fires or gas leaks and emergency workers removed the plane’s fuel to secure the scene, De Blasio said.
The highway was closed and emergency personnel were on the scene until about 6pm, when the plane was taken away on a flatbed truck to a local aviation facility, the FAA said.
FAA records indicated the plane was registered to an owner in South Salem.
Patricia Sapol, 29, was driving south on the highway with her husband when they saw emergency vehicles surrounding the downed plane near exit 13, about 15 minutes after the landing.
“We couldn’t believe it! We thought: ‘Oh my god that’s a plane!’ It was pretty incredible,” she said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the