Plane Hits Mail Truck During Emergency Highway Landing (Video)

A small airplane made a heart-stopping emergency landing on an Illinois highway, swooping just over a U.S. Postal Service truck before touching down on the pavement.

The dramatic landing happened around 10:42 a.m. Friday, Sept. 18, on U.S. Route 136 near Gifford, a small community in Champaign County.

Illinois State Police confirmed the aircraft was forced to land because of weather conditions. Remarkably, nobody was injured and no vehicles were struck.

Surveillance footage obtained by WCIA reportedly shows the small yellow propeller plane descending over the two-lane highway as a USPS mail truck travels directly beneath it.

For a split second, the aircraft appears frighteningly close to the truck’s roof before its wheels hit the roadway.

Local resident Josh Parrott told WCIA he watched the plane’s wings pass over the mail truck and believed the two came extremely close to colliding.

He then heard several loud screeching noises similar to tires braking hard on a runway.

Another witness, Hayden Henderson, compared the sound of the aircraft touching down to a train passing nearby and said he initially struggled to believe a plane had actually landed on the highway.

After safely touching down, the pilot continued along Route 136 before taxiing the airplane into a nearby driveway, where police vehicles were later seen gathered around it. The emergency landing occurred between Gifford’s village limits and Gordyville USA, according to local reporting.

Despite the bizarre scene, Illinois State Police said the plane did not block the highway and traffic remained able to move through the area.

The Federal Aviation Administration is also involved in reviewing the incident. The FAA generally conducts investigations into civil aviation incidents and says preliminary information can change as investigators gather additional evidence.

Authorities had not publicly identified the pilot or released detailed information about the aircraft as of the latest reports. Officials also had not explained exactly what weather conditions prompted the decision to put the plane down on a public highway.

A video report showing the aircraft after the unusual landing can be viewed through WAND News.

For the driver of the mail truck — and everyone else on Route 136 — the incident ended about as well as it possibly could have: a plane on the highway, a near miss caught on camera, and no reported injuries.