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MILLARD COUNTY — It was a close call for five people Saturday night, after their single-engine plane made a crash landing by U.S. Highway 50 in Millard County, near Scipio Lake.
The pilot, Norman Castle, said he had trouble with the engine and tried to set it down on the highway. But when he clipped a fence, and the plane came crashing to a stop.
Castle and two grandsons were flying from Escalante to Provo on Saturday night, along a neighbor who is a pilot and the neighbor's his son. When the engine failed, they did what they could to get on the ground safely.
"I tweaked the fence post as we came over, or it would have been a non-event if we had put it on the road," Castle said.
He shook his head as he looked at the damage to his Single Engine Cessna Turbo Monday. While it was a very rough landing — the propeller was bent and the landing gear collapsed — they all walked away unscathed.
"We feel blessed, not lucky," he said.
The only problem was they landed next to a rural highway with no cell phone coverage to call for help, so they had to hitchhike to Orem.
Castle has been flying for 40 years and calls this "incident No. 5" in his life. But he insists Saturday night wasn't his last time in the cockpit.
"We're going to haul it home and it will fly again. We're not done flying by any means," he said.
Still, Castle hopes this is the last flying incident he ever has to talk about.
