Video Shows Plane Crash Landing on Road After Running out of Fuel
"I Said, 'I'm Probably Going to Die.'"
In a harrowing video shot by a bystander, a pilot crashed his small plane onto an Orlando, Florida, road last Friday. It didn't look good for the person at the controls: "Oh my God!" exclaimed the woman behind the camera. Luckily, 40-year-old Remy Colin walked away with only minor injuries (he didn't even need to be hospitalized) and no one on the ground was hurt. The pilot said he was "embarrassed" but gave several interviews to explain what led to the scary scene.
Amanda Skuban, who filmed the emergency landing through her car windshield, said she "just kind of freaked." In the video, the small plane—said to be a Cessna 180—flies low over a four-lane roadway, banks heavily to the right, and lands hard on its wing before skidding into a nearby driveway and ending up on its nose. Keep reading to see the video.
The plane landed just west of Central Florida University around 4 pm. The pilot said he had been distracted while trying to fix a broken radio and lost power after running out of fuel. Colin gave an interview to Inside Edition in which he admitted, "It was pilot error. Just trying to do too much, rushing, a big mistake. I have more than 10,000 hours, and I've never run out of fuel, so I'm embarrassed."
"I said, 'Mayday, mayday, I'm going down,'" said Colin. "I said, 'I'm probably going to die,' so the best solution there was to let the plane stall. It slowed my fall enough that I didn't die, and I was able to bounce to put it in the trees and not hurt anyone else."
Colin's business, Aerial Messages, offers advertising such as banners, billboards, and skywriting. He appeared on Fox News' America's Newsroom Tuesday to elaborate on what went wrong. "It was a chain of events," he said. "I had bad information. I was supposed to have an hour and a half of fuel in my plane." "When I got onto the ramp, one of my radios was faulty, so I tried to troubleshoot it. I spent 20 minutes on the ramp, went up for five minutes, and again the radio was faulty." Colin said he was supposed to land immediately but took too much time trying to determine what was wrong with the radio. "It was an annual flight to see if the plane had been fixed correctly, and the plane was doing well apart from the radio," he said.
Colin said he was forced to stall the plane at 25 to 30 feet above the ground to avoid crashing into cars on the highway below. The stall allowed him to aim the plane toward trees and a driveway instead. "It was 4:00 over University (Boulevard). Worst traffic. There was absolutely nowhere to land," Colin told News 6 Orlando. "My choice was a lake or the road. I see a stretch of 300 feet. There was one red light. There was 100 cars on one side, 100 cars on the other side, so I had oncoming traffic. I had a stretch of maybe 100 feet, and I said, 'I'm gonna land it there.'" The Federal Aviation Authority and the National Transportation Safety Board are now investigating.
