Residents of a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb had their Sunday afternoon rocked when a plane attempted an emergency landing at a small general aviation airport, reports KXAS. A pilot couldn’t bring their Lancair IV-P to a stop and smashed through the perimeter fence at Aero Country Airport. The single-engine plane rolled out onto a parkway and crashed into a passing car.
The plane crash in McKinney, Texas sent one person to the hospital but the local fire department wouldn’t confirm if they were one of the aircraft’s two occupants or a person inside the car. Eyewitnesses told local outlets that it seemed like the Lancair’s brakes weren’t working. Jack Schneider, an onlooker at the airport to pick up a project plane, was able to capture the moment of impact on camera. He told WFAA:
“I saw the airplane coming down the runway quickly I knew that he wasn’t gonna have time to stop. It was clearly going too fast, the tires were smoking… So I quickly pulled out my phone because I could tell something was about to happen.”
Aero Country Airport only sees about 30 flights per day but has had two other significant crashes over the past decade. In 2016, three people were killed when two planes collided in mid-air about a half-mile from the airport. In 2019, a plane crashed into a home a quarter-mile from the runway. The two people in the plane survived the impact with non-life-threatening injuries.
The FAA is investigating this most recent incident including evaluating the footage recorded by Schneider.