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WINTER HAVEN, FL -- Two men in a home-built airplane survived a brush with death Sunday when they landed their plane on Havendale Boulevard.

22-year-old pilot Kyle Davis and passenger Joe Surowiec were flying the plane for a friend to the Lakeland Sun n' Fun Fly-In from Winter Haven when the engine failed.

The event was captured by two cameras, one in the cockpit and the other facing the engine.

When the engine failed, Davis quickly begins looking for a place to land. The two men look at a number of fields, but determine that they are unable to land in those locations.

Instead, the men decide to land in the road, where cars and businesses can be seen passing by.

Deputies were called to the scene, but had little to do since no there was no damage or injuries involved.

Both Davis and Surowiec declined on-scene medical attention.

Nice job. I thought it was funny how he pulled off the road after he got slowed down. Sure, it was good to get the plane off the road but if were me i'd stop then push the thing off by hand.

wow very job... it's safe if it's done right. (far away from playing children)

TrevDog wrote:wow very job... it's safe if it's done right. (far away from playing children)

And away from overhead power lines!

Phil

Nice save, but what kind of six lane road doesn't have any traffic ?

Nice job getting it down. Just don't let the state troopers see you filling up with gas and taking off!

Grassstrippilot wrote:Nice job getting it down. Just don't let the state troopers see you filling up with gas and taking off!

Why not? Isn't that legal in the Lower 48?

Phil

Nice job keeping a calm head.

They should have rolled into the nearest filling station, slapped down a $100 and said "top it off, we're in a hurry".

My reaction was that it was a horrible procedure implemented by untrained pilots. They were extremely lucky not to have hurt themselves or someone else. When experiencing a power failure, I have been trained to follow A, B, C.

A) Fly the plane, get your best glide Airspeed.
B) Pick the Best spot to land, quickly.
C) Run the Checklist, try a restart if possible.

The idea of repeatedly restarting the engine, and thus changing your landing spot, is damned stupid and only shear luck prevented their deaths. This is the reason that twins are more dangerous than singles. So you pick a best spot to land , restart the engine for a few seconds, add power, and now, as a result, overshoot your best spot? Damned stupid if you ask me, but you didn't.

Glad all went well. The way the engine restarted, ran a few seconds, started again and ran even less time, leads me to believe that they lost power for the same reason of the majority of engine failures.......out of gas. Just a feelin.

Nice job.

Why'd they keep shutin the engine off? Just like a glider!

"Brush with death"?!? It was just a power off landing. Gliders do it all the time. If that reporter saw me using a steak knife, would he say the same thing? After all, it could slip and fly right into my heart and then into several other people in the room. Brush with death. They were fine. And of course they "refused medical treatment". No one was hurt!!! They always have to use the most dramatic terms possible even though they might be misleading to the non-flying public.

I remember my mother calling one afternoon a few years ago. She said there was a plane crash on the news and she wondered if it was me. It wasn't a "crash". It was an emergency landing in a field. No damage, no injuries but the news people have to make it seam like it was some big thing. [/rantoff]

What a GREAT advertisement for Continental Motors !

"The 2009 Rotax 912 series- Offering you the most emergency landing practice that twenty thousand dollars can buy!"

Or how about this one...

EAA Oshkosh trip... $2500
Continental 85HP mid-time used engine at the Fly-Mart... $6500
Garbage can for all the advertising for LSA airplanes with Rotax engines... $29.95
Ear Muffs to keep from hearing un-educated new pilots talking about the Rotax engine... $5.00
Landing when and where you want to land... PRICELESS !

Having spent 6 years as a contest sailplane pilot with lots of un-planned off airport landings, I would like to offer the following reaction to the video:

1) Both guys remained calm enough to not do anything really stupid or waste precious time. That's good.

2) Unless you have just found more fuel in another tank to solve an engine stoppage from an empty tank... a restart is risky as mentioned by someone already. Whatever made it quit the first time can happen again (which it did in this video), and you could be over a far worse place to land the second time. Restarting probably depends on how good of a landing spot you have nearby the first time. And that depends on the judgment of the pilot most of the time.

3) I have no idea why Chimp #1 chose to land the airplane at 60 mph and then let it roll for a quarter of a mile while Chimp #2 was clapping his hands. I don't know what kind of an airframe was bolted to that Austrian lawnmower engine but most high wing light airplanes can slow down more than that one appears to have done. Every mile an hour faster makes a big increase in the amount of crash energy. The right thing to do is definitely land as slow as possible, stop the airplane immediately before something does jump in the way, and get the airplane out of the road.

4) Overall it was a success because nobody was hurt and no property damage. So I have to say the guy did a good job in general. But as with most of my emergency landings and most of everyone else's... there was significant room for improvement.