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.<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
By Jimmy Orr<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I was like, I’m pretty sure he’s landing,” Kelsi told Cowboy State Daily on Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Duttons then got out of the car to see if the pilot was okay, thinking perhaps it was a medical emergency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pilot was fine, they said, mentioning that they thought the pilot’s name was “Steve” and he was an airplane mechanic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steve told them there was some mechanical problem with the plane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “He said the engine was acting like it was starving for fuel and he thought there was something blocking the fuel line,” Levi said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless, the pilot was able to diagnose the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Duttons were happy to oblige. Moments later, the Wyoming Highway Patrol showed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trooper Logan Kelly, a four-year veteran of the Wyoming Highway Patrol, was the first there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said he saw the plane properly parked on the shoulder of the highway around mile-marker 37, about 23 miles north of Cheyenne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kelly said he was just pleased there was a happy ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Semel said instructors teach not so much the best option in an emergency situation, but what\u2019s the least bad option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe talk about highways as generally being good options but there\u2019s always the problem of lights, bridges, overpasses, heavy traffic,\u201d Semel said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “This looks reasonably flat, reasonably wide open, with no terrain around it. It looks like the ideal situation we hope for,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One might think the pilot would be rattled after making an emergency landing on an interstate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not the case with Steve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Duttons, on the other hand, were flabbergasted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What are the odds of this?” Kelsi said. “It was awesome.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. https:\/\/cowboystatedaily.com\/2024\/09\/21\/pilot-makes-emergency-landing-on-i-25-fixes-plane-then-takes-off-again\/ 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wyoming"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8619,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8616\/revisions\/8619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Plane](\"https:\/\/cowboystatedaily.imgix.net\/highway-patrol-plane-2-9-21-24.jpg?ixlib=js-3.8.0&q=75&auto=format%2Ccompress\")
Steve The Airplane Mechanic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Stop Traffic, Please<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Taking Off<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
“Remarkable”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Demeanor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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