The Morality of Road Landings

There are some things in aviation that are always no way, no how. Landing an airplane on a road isn’t one of them.

Driven by diabolical algorithms as they are, YouTube audiences can veer from the surprisingly urbane to the utterly lunatic and lots in between. In that vast middle is one viewer who goes off on me about once a year for a cavalier remark I made a few years ago about the morality—or lack thereof—of landing airplanes on public highways. Predictably, this week’s video on the street crash in Miami set him off once again.  

“You should never land on a street. Too many innocent people. Part of the risk of flying is not harming innocent people, so put it in the water or trees. In a previous video this clown Paul flips it, he claims we innocent drivers and pedestrians took the risk when we went out of our homes. So as long as the pilot saves his own skin (and plane) the dead family in the minivan, well they knew what they were getting into by going out to the Dairy Queen.”

The same guy goes into high dudgeon about once a year whether the video has to do with road landings, headsets or spot landings. He feels compelled to remind me of my utter depravity for that Dairy Queen crack. Mea culpa. He has a point, as the Miami crash tragically showed, although it was fatal for the pilot, not the drivers or car passengers. It’s good to be reminded that any pilot who has to put one down somewhere owes it to the people on the ground to minimize the risk to them to the degree possible. But for me, that just doesn’t equate to never land on a road. If you have no other choice, you make the best of it.

My calculus is that if you land with the traffic, the closing speeds are relatively low and cars are far more crashworthy than airplanes. This has been borne out in recent car/airplane confrontations, one of which I showed a clip of in the Miami video. That one occurred in Minneapolis in December 2020. The airplane, a Bellanca, slid down the interstate and sideswiped an SUV. The car was totaled, but there were no injuries. When I did the road landing video, I found a lot more like this, but I don’t recall any fatalities and maybe not many injuries. You could, I suppose, argue that the Bellanca pilot should have taken that median, but unless you’re in the seat, you don’t know what he saw and what he had to consider before committing to the landing.

So, to the hard no of never landing on a road, I haven’t changed my view and I’m not likely to. Find a better option if you can, but if there’s nothing else available, the probabilities favor you and the drivers.  

Coincidentally, and without realizing it, last week, we rode right by the site of the mother of all road landings. That would be Southern Airways Flight 242 on what was then State Route 381 in Georgia, on April 4, 1977. The town is New Hope and the route is now 52, which I ride a lot on our motorcycle trips into the mountains. There’s a memorial in New Hope and I’m making a note to visit it next time we’re up there later this summer. I didn’t realize it was there.

To refresh the details, 242 was a DC-9 enroute from Muscle Shoals and Huntsville, Alabama, to Atlanta when it ran through a thunderstorm so intense the hail and rain snuffed both engines and broke the windshields. The crew ran out of altitude and ideas and the only remaining choice was to line up on the highway. During the rollout, the airplane struck a gas station, swerving it into woods nearby. The fuselage broke up and caught fire. Of 83 people aboard, 20 survived, including the flight attendants. Nine people on the ground were killed, including a family of seven.

Applying the never-a-road morality to this, should the crew have ditched the airplane in the woods instead? Would that have traded nine on the ground for 20 more dead in the wreckage? Could you even consider such a calculation in the heat of the moment? Even knowing the outcome, that’s a no for me. The pilots had little time to make the best of a terrible situation and the highway was it. In my view, it’s sometimes the same for GA pilots responding to an engine out. Sure, don’t let the lure of pavement blind you to that field (or lake) next to the road, but if the highway is the only choice, try to avoid the cars and bend as little as possible. The accident record shows that it’s a high percentage bet.