Emergency Landing on the Highway

Plane running out of fuel touches down on U.S. 33

BOWDEN – An airplane traveling from North Carolina to Michigan was forced to make an emergency landing on U.S. Route 33 near the Faulkner Road exit in Randolph County Monday afternoon.    

Randolph County Sheriff Rob Elbon said he was the first to respond to the scene after a 911 call at approximately 3:20 p.m. saying a plane carrying one passenger had to make an emergency landing.   

“I was on a traffic stop on the Beverly Five-Lane when I heard the call come out, so I cleared off it (the traffic stop) and was the first one to arrive at the scene,” Elbon told The Inter-Mountain. “When I got there the pilot told me that the engine had quit and that it was a breath of fresh air when he looked out the window and saw the four-lane.”   

Elbon said the pilot of the small Cessna plane tore the tip off his wing when he clipped a road sign post during the landing.       

“The wingspan was talking up both lanes of the load when he landed, so he pushed the plane over in the median to get it out of the way of traffic,” Elbon said. “He (the pilot) said that once he got out and started looking over the plane he noticed that one of the caps on a fuel tank was loose. He believes that siphoned his fuel out.”   

Elbon said that 20 gallons of fuel was brought to the plane from the Elkins-Randolph County Regional Airport, and that the plane then took off on Route 33.   

“After the guys from the airport put the fuel in the plane, it started right up,” Elbon said. “We repaired the wing tip with some tape the pilot had and he took off and went up to the airport, where he fueled up and headed to Michigan.”     

Elbon said the pilot was lucky he was able to see the road and make a safe landing.   

“He (pilot) said that when he flies he generally looks for places to land in case he would have to go down, fields and things like that,” Elbon said. “I told him if he would have been further south it would have been a lot harder to land it in the road because of power lines and things like that. We were happy that everything worked out for him.”   

The Elkins City Police, Elkins Fire Department, and Randolph County Emergency Squad assisted the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office at the scene.