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Comment by eigenhombre | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about the "Last" in the title, and how common road landings are in general. We had one not far from us awhile back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QOMDyMZD3k, saw the plane from a bridge on my bike commute home... a strange day was had by all, with zero casualties.

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One in Knoxville earlier this year as well, small plane and no injuries. I guess the article is talking about large commercial flights.

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2023/01/21/small-p...

Amazing video in that link!

yeah, i think this is maybe the best video of a road landing ive ever seen.

That looked like a nasty prop strike, and a bit of a strike to the wing tip too. There's tons of clips on youtube where it appears people set them down without damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRUdFOuHvGM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1I2Mk-MHV8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3MlRRM9tpA

That's why HN has a rule to post articles with their original title... and that is "Highway to Ruin: The crash of Southern Airways flight 242".

I agree, the headline has been editorialized in order to drive engagement.

The article says the following: "it seems that the crash permanently killed the idea of landing large airliners on highways. This Hollywood staple makes for good cinema, but in real life it usually ends in catastrophe — and while McKenzie and Keele were not the first to discover this, they were the last,no passenger jet pilot has tried again since."

The article did not use that headline, and is explicit about what it claims:

> no passenger jet pilot has tried again since (emphasis added)

What a cute little Ercoupe. Also, I really appreciated the CBS2 headline shot at 0:26 - "PLANE ON LSD."

There was at least one (successful) such landing (small plane, not commercial) in NC last year as well[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCgrGTZdd4A

I guess the article implicitly refers to commercial aviation.

There was another one recently this past year where the pilot landed on Interstate 355.

An Ercoupe needs about 300m to land normally.

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