Featured Image Credit: clashreport/X
If there's one sight you don't want to see as you're driving down the highway, it's a military cargo plane flying so low that it looks like it could crash into you.
That looks to be what happened to drivers near Kayseri Erkilet International Airport in Turkey earlier this year when a malfunction made for a nail-biting return to land for a huge C-160 plane.
The incident thankfully involved no injuries or fatalities, but video from the day makes it clear just how much peril the plane was in - and, therefore, how much danger people underneath it were in, too.
Footage uploaded to Reddit shows the point of view of a truck driver on ground level, who pulled to the side of the road to watch the plane.
It's flying incredibly low, and you can see pedestrians standing to see what happens, too, as it passes directly overhead at barely any distance at all.
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The plane carries on at roughly the same altitude before disappearing from view, and we now know that it was able to make it back to a runway to make an emergency landing without anyone suffering any injuries.
The incident report that has been shared since then (it happened in January this year) indicated that the plane lost at least some of its power very soon after takeoff in a training exercise.
However, observers have noted that the plane's power loss looks like it also caused a landing gear issue, and the C-160 most likely therefore sustained significant damage while making its landing.
In the video it's hard to tell how much propulsion the plane is running on - it has twin propeller engines but the frame rate of the video makes it difficult to determine whether they're stalled and not spinning, or simply spinning at a speed that matches the video's frame rate.
🔴Kayseri’de arıza sonrası şehir üzerinde alçak uçuş yapan uçağın iniş anına ait görüntüler ortaya çıktı.
— herdem_aviation (@muratherdemm) January 25, 2024
🔴İniş sonrası lastiklerden duman çıkan C160 tipi uçağın pistte duramayarak toprak zemine çıktığı görülüyor. pic.twitter.com/FXAZ8yoDOz
Videos and images collected posted on social media appear to show the plane making a skidding landing, looking completely off balance.
One thing many commenters have noted is how impressively the pilot managed to stick a really difficult landing.
One commenter on Reddit wrote: "Pilot did great! Put everything he had, keeping it in the air.......Well done!"
C-160 planes have a variety of potential uses, including as cargo but also as long-distance reconnaissance options. It looks like this plane - which appears to be part of the Turkish Air Force - was running a training mission.
