A small training aircraft was forced to land on a canal access road in Mesa on Monday morning after experiencing mechanical issues. Authorities said the plane did strike a residential wall, but no injuries were reported.
Emergency crews responded to reports of a plane crash near Greenfield and McKellips roads around 8:30 a.m., according to the Mesa Police Department. The area sits just southwest of Falcon Field Airport.
Both people aboard the flight school plane managed to exit the plane and walk away safely, police said. No one on the ground was hurt.
The pilot attempted to bring the struggling plane down on the canal pathway after reporting engine issues. During the landing, the plane collided with a concrete block wall surrounding a nearby home, damaging pool equipment connected to a gas line.
Mesa Utilities personnel arrived at the scene to address the damaged gas line, Marrisa Ramirez-Ramos with the Mesa Fire and Medical Department told NTD News in an email. The homeowner was not injured.
Rescue teams searched the neighborhood between Val Vista and Greenfield roads before finding the downed plane on the canal access road near McLellan Road, Ramirez-Ramos said.
Authorities did not order any evacuations from the surrounding area.
"It could have hit my house; absolutely could have hit any of the houses that sit along the canal," Wise told the Tucson CBS affiliate. "I applaud the pilot for being able to put it down without crashing into a house and for looking for a safe place to put it down where he is not in the middle of the road or in somebody's house."
The plane belonged to International Air Services and had made four trips to Jamaica in the previous week, according to Federal Aviation Administration records and FlightAware tracking data. Jamaica had been devastated by Hurricane Melissa two weeks earlier, a Category 5 storm that damaged roughly 120,000 buildings.
Not every recent incident has ended as deadly. In August, pilot Mark Finkelstein successfully landed his plane in the ocean off Oak Island Pier in North Carolina after his engine quit, suffering only minor injuries.
"Once it stopped, I just said, 'Okay, I'm really going to be doing a water landing,' you know, there's no alternative at this point," Finkelstein told local station WWAY.