And a good thing about our Wyoming highways is they’re not terribly busy making this sort of emergency landing and take off a lot easier.
A pilot flying from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to Oregon on Saturday morning had a mechanical issue and had to land his plane on Interstate 25 about 23 miles north of Cheyenne. The pilot, also a mechanic, was able to fix the plane and then took off again from the Interstate.
By Jimmy Orr
It’s not every day when a plane lands in front of you on Interstate 25 but it happened on Saturday morning to Levi and Kelsi Dutton of Casper.
The couple was driving down to Cheyenne for their daughter’s softball game when they spotted a single engine airplane about 150 feet off the ground flying directly over the highway about 23 miles north of Cheyenne.
“I was like, I’m pretty sure he’s landing,” Kelsi told Cowboy State Daily on Saturday afternoon.
“So he popped down and landed right in front of us,” she said. “So we just hit the brakes and saw him pulling over and thought we should probably stop too.”
Steve The Airplane Mechanic
The Duttons then got out of the car to see if the pilot was okay, thinking perhaps it was a medical emergency.
The pilot was fine, they said, mentioning that they thought the pilot’s name was “Steve” and he was an airplane mechanic.
Steve told them there was some mechanical problem with the plane.
“He said the engine was acting like it was starving for fuel and he thought there was something blocking the fuel line,” Levi said.
The Duttons, who said they were the only drivers who stopped, then watched Steve open up a port, drain some fuel out and then check it in a vial — but didn’t see anything that popped out at him.
Regardless, the pilot was able to diagnose the problem.
“I got the tools right here,” he told the Duttons. “I’ll just open it up, figure out what’s going on and get her fixed.”
Stop Traffic, Please
While he started working on the plane, he put the Duttons to work — asking them to stop traffic on the Interstate so he could take off again, once he fixed it.
The Duttons were happy to oblige. Moments later, the Wyoming Highway Patrol showed up.
Trooper Logan Kelly, a four-year veteran of the Wyoming Highway Patrol, was the first there.
He said he saw the plane properly parked on the shoulder of the highway around mile-marker 37, about 23 miles north of Cheyenne.
Steve told Kelly that he had left Scottsbluff, Nebraska, earlier that morning on his way to Oregon when he “started to lose RPMs on his engine.”
“He spotted some area in the a field where he thought he could land but ultimately circled back to I-25 and lined up like it was a runway,” Kelly said. “And then landed it on the Interstate.”
Kelly said Steve was able to fix the plane, also mentioning to the troopers that it was a fuel issue, and “put it all back together.”
Taking Off
Steve then taxied his plane south and took off from the highway on his way to Cheyenne Regional Airport, where he could do a full inspection.
Kelly had never heard of a plane landing on a highway, the pilot repairing it on the highway, and then taking off again from the highway.
“This is a first,” Kelly said. “No one has heard of this before outside of an exercise with the Air National Guard or another military branch.”
Kelly said he was just pleased there was a happy ending.
“Remarkable”
Mitch Semel, the the chief instructor for the Take Flight Aviation School in New York, was glad there was a positive ending too, calling it a “remarkable story.”
Semel said instructors teach not so much the best option in an emergency situation, but what’s the least bad option.
“We talk about highways as generally being good options but there’s always the problem of lights, bridges, overpasses, heavy traffic,” Semel said.
“This looks reasonably flat, reasonably wide open, with no terrain around it. It looks like the ideal situation we hope for,” he added.
Demeanor
One might think the pilot would be rattled after making an emergency landing on an interstate.
Not the case with Steve.
“He was really calm,” Kelsi said. “He actually said he wasn’t going to call home until after he figured things out because he didn’t want to cause panic.”
The Duttons, on the other hand, were flabbergasted.
“What are the odds of this?” Kelsi said. “It was awesome.”
