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When the Highway Becomes a Runway

My latest Slate column examines this rare, but not as rare as you might think, phenomenon.

There are no hard numbers on annual occurrences of airplane landings on highways or streets, but a troll through the Federal Aviation Administration’s incident database shows that there tend to be more than a dozen such events in any given year (that the FAA knows about, at least). The events range in nature and geography. Mechanical difficulty ranks prominently in the causative universe. But pilots running out of fuel (”fuel starvation,” as investigators put it), whether owing to unforeseen flight complications or actual negligence, is common, too. One FAA report dryly refers to a plane that “landed on a public street to discharge a passenger.” And emergency landings can take place on deserted country roads, residential neighborhoods, or bustling thoroughfares. As the FAA’s Les Dorr, after looking through the database himself, put it to me in an e-mail: “Highway landings are rather more frequent than I would have thought.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 8:12 am and is filed under Etc., Roads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “When the Highway Becomes a Runway”

  1. Rasmus Jensen Says:
    March 15th, 2010 at 1:47 pm

    If one looks at the E45/A7 motorway in Northern Germany near Bollingstedt and Jalm in Google Earth with the settings such as it will show airports with a plane symbol, one can see that the E45/A7 apparently doubles as “Bollingstedt Highway Strip” but I have not been able to find any information online about it :)

  2. Bossi Says:
    March 15th, 2010 at 2:17 pm

    You might appreciate Gibraltar’s airport, which takes your subject line even more literally than already intended:

    http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Airport+of+Gibraltar,+Gibraltar&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=54.665451,114.169922&ie=UTF8&split=0&hq=&hnear=Airport+of+Gibraltar,+Gibraltar&ll=36.150888,-5.348711&spn=0.013774,0.027874&t=h&z=16

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibraltar_Airport

  3. aaron Says:
    March 16th, 2010 at 9:31 am

    A major part of the building of our highway system was to create dual use system of runways in strategically vital areas.

  4. Don Says:
    March 16th, 2010 at 9:45 am

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35885646/ns/us_news/

    Here you go Tom.

    Plane makes an emergency landing on a SC beach and kills a jogger on the beach who didn’t hear the plane which was gliding with the engine out because he had his iPod on.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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