January 17-2014
An Iranian-American pilot flying a small plane over Anchorage, Alaska, found his aircraft losing power and landed it safely—in the middle of a major city street.
Armon Tabrizi, 27, who previously lived in Wisconsin, recently moved to Alaska where he was teaching people how to fly small planes.
He said when the plane started losing power, he was not immediately sure where to land. He looked around and decided to put the Cessna 172RG Cutlass down in the middle of Boniface Parkway last Tuesday afternoon, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
. . . safe-landing
Tabrizi avoided cars, overhead wires and stoplights. No one in the plane or on the ground was injured. But there were sure a lot of surprised looks.
Meredith Hazen was driving on the four-lane street when the plane came over her car from the rear and just barely over her roof. “It took me a second to realize: he’s not flying that low on purpose,” she recalled.
“I could see the left wing hit the ground, and the second car in front of me, I think, hit his brakes really hard,” she said. “He went up on the snow and the barrier, because he didn’t want to hit the wing.”
Hazen and others pulled over to check on the plane’s occupants. Police and firefighters arrived in minutes, she told the Daily News.
Two other people were with Tabrizi in the plane, which is owned by Land and Sea Aviation, a flight school based at the city’s Merrill Field. The incident is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.
“I can’t talk too much about the investigation that’s going on,” Tabrizi said. “I’m just glad everybody is fine and stuff, and we’ll see what happens.”
The plane was on a routine maintenance flight, according to Ben Kinney, a flight instructor and operations supervisor for the company. He said the plane had not had any recent problems or gone through significant mechanical work.
Kinney said he couldn’t speculate on what could’ve gone wrong.
Tabrizi, who also is a flight instructor with the firm, said the plane had “significant issues” as it was heading south after departing from Merrill Field. Passenger Arthur Racicot, a Land and Sea Aviation mechanic, and the other passenger, another pilot, remained calm.
“The engine never quit,” Tabrizi said. “But we lost enough power and we were unable to maintain flight.”
The three men on board discussed landing at Campbell Airstrip, but worried the plane would hit trees. Tabrizi said he also considered landing at the US military’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.
But he chose the median strip of the road instead. The only visible damage was the crumpled landing gear.
The newspaper said it was at least the third small aircraft to make an emergency landing on an Alaska roadway in the past year.
