Small plane with mechanical problem clips pickup in emergency landing on North Fort Myers road, no injuries

A small plane with two pilots aboard made an emergency landing on a busy road in North Fort Myers on Saturday, Nov. 7, and clipped a pickup truck on the way down. Nobody was injured.

The Lee County Sheriff's Office said the landing happened around noon on Bayshore Road, near Interstate 75.

What happened on Bayshore Road

Flight-tracking data shows the aircraft took off from Sebring, Florida, around 11 a.m. It was back on the ground about 50 minutes later, at 11:50 a.m., on a public road instead of a runway.

Deputies said the two pilots experienced a mechanical issue and tried to put the plane down on Bayshore Road.

Video of the landing shows the aircraft sliding at high speed along the roadway while other vehicles travel nearby. The sheriff's office said the plane clipped the rear of a pickup truck heading eastbound.

That was the only contact reported. The sheriff's office reported no injuries to the pilots, the truck's occupants or anyone else on the road.

The sheriff's response

Sheriff Carmine Marceno called it a good outcome. "Thankfully, this incident had a positive outcome, and no one was injured," he said. "Given the recent tragic news involving aviation accidents, we are especially grateful that everyone is safe."

Marceno also thanked the responding deputies, FDOT Southwest Florida and Bayshore Fire Rescue for their quick response.

A plane sliding down an active road, with traffic moving on both sides, could have ended very differently. A clip to a truck's rear end is about the best result anyone could ask for in that situation.

The week's other Florida crash

The sheriff's reference to recent aviation accidents points to the Learjet that crashed Sunday, Nov. 1, in Greenacres, in Palm Beach County, on the other side of the state. All nine people aboard died. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office identified the victims on Wednesday.

Federal investigators are still working to determine what caused that crash. National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman has said that crash had no connection to President Trump's Mar-a-Lago, which sits less than ten miles from the crash site.

No investigator has linked the Greenacres crash to Saturday's landing in North Fort Myers. They involve different aircraft, different regions of Florida and, so far as anyone has said, different problems. One was a jet with nine people aboard. The other was a small plane with two pilots and a reported mechanical failure.

What investigators still have to answer

The Federal Aviation Administration is leading the investigation into the Bayshore Road landing. The exact nature of the mechanical issue has not been released.

Neither the sheriff's office nor the FAA has publicly named the pilots, the aircraft's registration or its owner. They have not said whether the plane was privately owned, on a training flight or on another kind of trip.

They also have not said whether the pilots had other options, such as a nearby airport, once the problem developed. The flight lasted 50 minutes, so the trouble could have started at any point after departure from Sebring. Investigators have not said when the problem began or what the pilots reported while still airborne.

The plane came down near the I-75 interchange, one of the busier stretches in the area. The sheriff's office has not said whether the pilots had other options for where to land.

The FAA's findings will determine whether the failure was in the aircraft itself, such as an engine or a control system, or tied to maintenance or something else. The agency has not given a timeline for a preliminary finding.