Just an Airplane Casually Landing in the Middle of a Busy Highway

From Popular Mechanics

• A tiny airplane made an emergency landing in the middle of traffic on a Quebec highway.

• Pilots of all kinds of planes must be prepared to try to land anywhere if they need to.

• Myths persist that American highways were built as runways, but some in Europe and other countries really were.

Drivers on a highway outside Quebec City slowed to a crawl last week after a small airplane had to make an emergency landing in the middle of moving traffic. Thankfully, there were no injuries.

Highway landings like this one are rare in Canada—it's just the second in the country's history—and equally uncommon in the U.S. Most recently, a small plane emergency landed on a surface street in Washington in 2019.

Despite a persistent urban legend about the U.S. interstate highway system, engineers didn't design American roads with airplanes in mind. In Europe, however, leftover planning from both Nazi Germany and the Cold War influenced the development and building of true highway runway systems called highway strips. Strategically important Poland had 21 of these drogowy odcinek lotniskowy (“road airport section”) at one point.

Snopes says the U.S. considered a similar project in 1944, but didn’t go through with it. The fact that some stretches of interstate highway could serve for emergency landings in some extreme kind of crisis is a coincidence of design, not a plan.

The fastest route between states—and, indeed, the interstate system was designed for national mobility, especially in a defense emergency—is the straightest line possible, with allowances for either going through or totally avoiding major cities. Speed limits are determined by factors like the straightness, visibility, width, and surface materials of a given road, meaning the safest way to drive fast is in a very straight flat line.

So if a distressed small airplane is a hammer, then many American roads look like a nail. And Autoroute 40, the Quebecois highway where this small plane landed, is the equivalent of an American interstate highway. With advance notice of a distressed plane, the Surete du Quebec—the Quebecois police force—could be on hand to help ensure a safe emergency landing.

In the video, the tiny plane doesn’t even take up the full width of one side of the highway, and cars continue to crowd behind and around it. Fortunately, as is the law in much of the U.S., the taxiing plane stays in the slow lane.

H/T: Interesting Engineering

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