Stratford, Connecticut – December 26, 1991
Just after 9:00 a.m. on December 26, 1991, a single-engine Piper Comanche, with a lone pilot aboard, left Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford bound for Oxford, Connecticut. Just after take off the pilot radioed that he was having engine trouble and didn’t think he could make it back to the airport. He opted to set the plane down on Interstate 95, which runs north and south along Connecticut’s shoreline. The aircraft came down in the southbound lanes of the highway where it skidded into a guardrail then careened across all three southbound lanes and slammed into a Jersey barrier.
The pilot was trapped in the wreck with critical injuries, and it took rescue workers 30 minutes to extract him from the cockpit. Meanwhile traffic backed up for six miles in both directions.
Miraculously no automobiles or trucks were involved in the accident, and state police attributed this to a nearly empty highway at the time of the crash, due to it being the morning after Christmas when most people had the day off.
Source:
New York Times, “Small Plane Crash Lands On Highway”, December 26, 1991