TOOELE COUNTY, Utah — It’s something no pilot wants to hear, and on Sunday, it became Justin Sisson’s reality.
“I actually called my wife and just said, 'Hey, this is what's happening,'” Sisson said. “I’m going to try to live through it.”
Sisson started flying last February and got his private pilot certificate in September of last year.
“I got the opportunity when I was like eight to skip school and go fly on some private jet,” Sisson said. "Ever since, I kind of caught the bug.”
Sunday started like any other day, when Sisson and a friend of his — who is also working to get his license — wanted to take a short flight.
“He's like, 'Look, I'm getting stressed out. Let's just go for a flight.' So that's what we were doing,” Sisson said. "We're just going to Wendover to kind of let him just kind of not worry about all the test requirements that he's going to have."
They were coming from Wendover and heading toward Tooele when he noticed some engine roughness.
Nothing he tried improved that roughness, so they turned to emergency frequencies, where it was suggested to land on I-80 near Grantsville.
“I did not want to land on I-80, because there have been stories in the past where children have been killed from a plane having to make an emergency landing,” Sisson said. “If anything was going to happen, it was just going to be me and my buddy. Like, that's the risk that we took. No one else on the freeway took that risk today.”
Sisson said they were experiencing partial engine power loss.
“I was coming in a little fast, and I was judging there was a semi-truck that was in front of us, and I knew if I had kept going, we would have hit the semi-truck,” Sisson said, “So I essentially ballooned over the semi-truck and started a new, slower descent onto the freeway.”
No injuries were reported.
WATCH: Small plane towed off I-80 after emergency landing
Martin O’Loughlin, the president of Cornerstone Aviation, said there are some things pilots are taught to look out for in emergency landings.
“We look off the nose and find a field,” O’Loughlin said, “And if there's a road there, if there's a huge parking lot, if there's an airport, all the better. And then we learn what air speed to fly, to glide down.”
O’Loughlin said there is a lot of anxiety recently around flying, but that’s because there’s been an increase in awareness — not crashes.
“We've probably never had a period where we're safer — both commercial, including the fact that we had that tragic event in DC — still, year by year, we get better and better,” O’Loughlin said.
Sisson said while this isn’t going to deter him from flying again, he hopes to never encounter another situation like this one.
“I probably made one of the best landings of my life, to be honest,” Sisson said. “I don't even know that I've fully processed everything that's gone on, or, I mean, how lucky and good I am. I mean, there's some days I'd rather be lucky than good, and I think today, I was both.”
