A Cessna 172 Cutlass made an emergency landing Tuesday afternoon on a major thoroughfare in Anchorage due to engine failure after takeoff. The plane lost the power needed to land at a nearby military airstrip, so a break in traffic on the roadway was the best option.
The red-and-white Cessna made a rough landing in the middle of Boniface Parkway near Perry Drive, touching down on a snowed-over median just after 1 p.m. The impact shoved snow into its nose-wheel compartment and appeared to have bent the landing gear.
The plane departed nearby Merrill Field around 1 o'clock with three people aboard. The pilot reported losing power after taking off, said Anchorage Police Lt. Mark Thelen.
"They were in the area that's right over by the police station, right by the Campbell Airstrip area, and they thought they'd try to set it down there," Thelen said. "But there were too many trees, so they elected at that point to follow Boniface" up to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson for an emergency landing.
The pilot -- a flight instructor at Land & Sea Aviation Alaska according to Arthur Racicot, a mechanic for the company who was aboard the plane -- saw the break in traffic and decided to land, Thelen said.
"It was the best decision they could've made," the lieutenant said.
No one was injured during the landing, and the plane struck no vehicles on its way to a stop.
NTSB: Accident label may not apply
The crash closed traffic on Boniface for a short time, but police opened up one lane in both directions quickly. The plane's three occupants appeared in good spirits as they waited for aviation officials to arrive, first the Federal Aviation Administration, which declined to comment, and next a National Transportation Safety Board investigator. Racicot helped dig out snow from around the plane before it was reeled onto a flatbed and strapped down. The tricky process took nearly an hour.
NTSB investigator Chris Shaver said he was unsure if the plane's emergency landing warranted an accident classification. In order for the agency to call the landing an accident, the plane has to have substantial damage, "Enough to where it's structurally unsound or its flight characteristics are affected," he said.
The damage appeared minimal at a glance, Shaver said. And the landing gear and engine are excluded from what constitutes substantial damage.
"Those won't count toward whether or not we look it at as an accident," he said. "Once we get it back to the hangar and start to take things apart, we'll begin to see the insides and whether anything is bent or tweaked. This will likely go down as just an incident."
Contact Jerzy Shedlock at jerzy(at)alaskadispatch.com. Follow him on Twitter @jerzyms