A small plane with engine trouble made an emergency landing on a moving tractor-trailer Thursday on I-10 near El Paso, TX [5 miles east of Fabens] just after 2 pm.
Moments later when the truck driver realized something had happened, he stopped and the plane slid off the top of the trailer, landing belly-up.
The pilot, his wife, and the driver were uninjured.
“At first [the driver said he] did not know,” Tela Mange, public information officer for the Texas Dept. of Public Safety told Fleet Owner. The only indication the driver had of the extra load the truck was carrying was the added drag the plane created, she said. “He might have felt he wasn’t going as fast as he had been been going.”
Although it’s not unusual for small planes to make emergency landings on highways, that section of I-10 typically has light traffic, making the likelihood of such an incident remote.
“That part of the state is not bumper to bumper— it’s basically miles and miles of miles and miles,” Mange said. “The pilot might have thought that he had plenty of space and didn’t see the 18-wheeler— it’s not like he had a window on the floor.”
