Barnegat Road in Stafford Township, New Jersey was used as an impromptu landing strip on Sunday morning when a small airplane carrying skydivers lost power and had to put down in a hurry. Amazingly, the pilot brought the plane to a stop without taking out any cars.
The clip above, which has popped up all over the place, originally comes from the Stafford Township Police Department’s traffic cam footage they uploaded to Facebook.
The New York Times, NBC and others report that the plane was a single-engined four seater that “lost power” while carrying students from the Skydive East Coast Skydiving School. I guess whether or not this turns out to be good or bad publicity for them is TBD... but this looks like some impressive piloting to a layman like myself.
The only reported injury was “a cut” on the arm of a skydiving instructor, but the port wing right around the strut looks like it took a pretty decent dent.
Naturally, a few images of the plane parked on the median made their way to the Internet:
Local police shut down the road in both directions for an hour and a half, while the Federal Aviation Administration and local authorities are still investigating what caused the problem in the first place.
Hat tip to Arpad!
Contact the author at andrew@jalopnik.com.