A routine afternoon in Prince George, British Columbia, turned deadly when a small plane made a dramatic emergency landing on a busy road. What would normally be airspace far overhead came crashing down into the flow of traffic, leaving one person dead and two others in hospital. The sudden descent of an aircraft onto a road used by ordinary drivers turned a stretch of the city into an emergency scene.
According to police, the aircraft struck two vehicles as it came down this afternoon. Rather than finding open ground, the plane came to earth among cars that were on the road at the time, and the impact was severe enough to involve more than one vehicle. That detail underscores just how populated the area was when the plane was forced down.
The person who died was in one of those vehicles. In other words, the fatality was not aboard the aircraft itself but on the ground, an ordinary road user caught in the path of the descending plane. It is the kind of outcome that makes an emergency landing on a busy road so dangerous, because the risk extends well beyond the people in the cockpit.
Beyond the person killed, two others were taken to hospital in connection with the crash. Their conditions were not detailed, but their hospitalization adds to the toll from an incident that unfolded in a matter of seconds. Emergency crews were left dealing with both the wreckage of the plane and the vehicles it had struck.
A witness who spoke to CBC News described just how close the disaster came to claiming even more. The witness said the plane's wing struck a pickup truck as it came down, an account that helps illustrate the chaotic path the aircraft took as it hit the road and the vehicles on it.
The same witness said the plane's propeller came within metres of his own vehicle. That near miss captures how narrow the margins were for those on the road, with the spinning propeller passing dangerously close to another driver who happened to be nearby when the plane came down.
For now, it is still not clear what forced the plane to make the emergency landing. Investigators have not said what went wrong in the air or why the pilot was compelled to bring the aircraft down onto a busy road rather than a safer location. Until that question is answered, the focus remains on the people killed and injured and on piecing together how an ordinary afternoon ended with a plane in the middle of traffic.