SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — It's a story that's becoming an all too familiar sight in San Diego County — a small plane landing on something other than a runway. On Monday, it involved a single-engine Cessna touchdown down in the dirt near the center median of the northbound I-15.
According to California Highway Patrol, the incident happened on I-15 just south of Balboa Avenue. The plane landed around 4:45 p.m., according to the plane's path on FlightAware.com, less than an hour after it took off from Montgomery-Gibbs Airport.
An investigator with the Federal Aviation Administration told ABC 10News on the scene there were two people on board. Neither was injured. No cars were hit as well.
A Sigalert was issued for sometime, but the Cessna T206 with the tail number N57LB was towed away from the scene with traffic moving at a normal pace again about two hours later.
ABC 10News checked the Air Traffic Control log on LiveATC.net from the Montgomery-Gibbs Airport around the time of the landing and heard this over the radio.
'Mayday! Mayday! 57-Lima Bravo (LB). Lost engine on left base," he said.
The 57LB aligns with the tail number of the plane on the freeway.
It was a calm tone in a moment of distress from the pilot.
Air Traffic Control tried to clear traffic on a runway for the pilot to land safely at the airport.
"Cleared to land," ATC said. "Traffic is departing ahead. Traffic ahead of you also going around."
"I can't," the pilot replied. "I can't restart it. I think I might hit the 15."
The official reason for the emergency landing is unclear, but it appears the pilot is citing an engine failure based on his communications.
The flight path on FlightAware shows the plane flying several patterns, traveling west up the coast to Oceanside before turning around and landing in the dirt next to I-15, not more than a mile from the Montgomery-Gibbs Airport.
"At the altitude he was at, when the motor quit, he didn't have a lot of places to go. He picked a good one," said Rich Martindell, a retired aircraft accident investigator.
He said, based on the flight path, it looks like this was a routine training flight. Because the pilot and passenger are alive, and the aircraft is in tact, he said this should be an easy investigation.
"First thing they'll do is look and make sure there's gas in the tanks," he said. "Then, they'll look at the engine and see what they can find — if they can find anything wrong with it."
The incident comes less than a week after a Cessna 182 landed on a street in Fallbrook, about a month and a half after a Piper PA-28 landed on the I-805 in Sorrento Valley and happened in an area near the Murphy Canyon crash that killed six people in May.
Incidents that, to some, might seem to be happening at an increasing rate in San Diego County.
"Right now, you're right. The gut feel seems like it's happening frequently," Martindell said. "The symptom is the same, but we don't know that the cause is the same. That's what we have to start looking for to be able to say there's a trend."
While preliminary reports have been released for all crashes mentioned above, save for the one that happened on Monday, the official causes for all four are still under investigation.
