On Saturday, May 4, the plane that made an emergency landing on the Tallinn highway near Ādaži was piloted by an instructor who had gone on a private flight with a passenger, the LETA agency found out.
As the chief flight instructor of the pilot school “Eriva” Juris Ignatovičs explained to the LETA agency, any pilot school has two types of flights – training flights and rental flights, where former students, instructors or any person with a pilot’s license can be at the controls of the plane. According to a certain procedure, these people are checked before the flight.
Ignatovich noted that the incident on the highway in Tallinn had an experienced instructor at the controls, which he said played a big role in the fact that everything ended well and everyone was alive. Currently, the school is waiting for the results of the investigation, which will probably be ready within a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, the instructor himself has not yet been spoken to, as he is most likely still in shock. It is planned to be done after the May holidays.
“This is classified as an accident, which is when people are injured or the plane is damaged. In this case, there is structural damage where the wing of the plane is crossed by a traffic sign. There have been no accidents so far, nothing has ever been broken, and the school has been operating since 2007 .year. There was another serious incident, but there was a problem with the control system, and the pilot landed the plane without damage in Spilve meadow,” said Ignatovičs.
He added that the pilot school is ready for such situations, they are seriously discussed and taught.
When asked about the losses, Ignatovičs answered that they have not been calculated yet, it is planned to do so later. The school has another plane of the same type that can be flown, so it will have to be used for a while, and it won’t be a big problem. Currently, the summer season has started, which is also the flight season, as a result of which this plane will have a higher load.
According to preliminary information, the aircraft made an emergency landing on the highway because it had problems with the operation of the engine, informed Aivis Vincevs, head of operational situations of the Civil Aviation Agency (CAA). He stated that before the emergency landing, the pilot had notified AS “Latvijas Gaisa satiksme” about the problems, but the time span was probably too short to stop the traffic on the highway.
“The technical problems occurred at an altitude of about 500 meters, and the time span for stopping the traffic was too short. The pilot tried to fly to the airfield in Ādaži, but the height was not enough for him to successfully land there,” explained Vincevs.
He mentioned that there was a similar case on the road in 2022 in the Cēsis region, when the plane was forced to make an emergency landing due to the weather. However, the traffic there was not as dense as on the highway in Tallinn.
Vincevs admitted that the consequences of what happened could have been different, considering that the highway is heavily used and many cars drive on it. However, he urges not to speculate about what could have happened, because the only consequence of the accident is actually a damaged plane.
The investigation and expertise of the incident will be carried out by the Transport Accident and Incident Investigation Office. Vilis Ķipurs, the head of the Aviation accident and incident investigation department, told LETA agency that there is nothing to comment on the investigation that has started yet.
LETA already wrote that a small plane made an emergency landing on the Tallinn highway near Ādaži on Saturday evening.
CAA operational situation manager Vincevs confirmed to LETA agency that the general aviation aircraft made an emergency landing near Ādaži, landing on the highway. There were two people on the plane, but none of them were hurt.
The video taken by the eyewitness shows that the plane lands on the Tallinn highway, flying from the Riga side. As it lands, the plane merges into the flow of cars, but catches a traffic sign in the middle of the road with its left wing, which changes the plane’s trajectory, causing it to enter the opposite lane, successfully avoiding a collision with cars.
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