A North Carolina pilot late last night successfully landed his single-engine Piper Cherokee between cars on Highway 321 a few miles short of Hickory Regional Airport after running out of fuel.
The pilot, Eric Klein, told a reporter for WSOC that when he ran out of fuel he was too low to make the airport and so he decided to set his airplane down on the northbound lanes of the highway, using the lights from the cars as a guide.
“I was coming back from Clarksburg, West Virginia, and should have had three hours of fuel left in the plane,” Klein told the news station. “I had excessive fuel burn for some reason and only had two hours and 10 minutes, and ran out of fuel about five miles short of the Hickory Airport.”
Klein managed to land his airplane without hitting anything, bringing it safely to a stop on the road in Granite Falls, North Carolina, at about 11 p.m.
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