A man says he is lucky to be alive after a small aircraft crashed right in front of him while he was driving near Buttonville Airport on Tuesday, narrowly missing his vehicle.
Bill Chan was driving westbound along 16th Avenue near Highway 404 around 2 p.m. when a small single-engine plane came out of nowhere and crashed into a ditch beside the road.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Chan said. “I see cars crashing, but not airplanes. And it almost crashed into me. I was very scared.”
Chan said that the plane was about “two-car lengths” away from his vehicle when it crashed.
“I feel I’m very lucky to be alive and nobody got hurt.”
Chan’s dashboard camera captured the incident, showing the plane veering into the path of the vehicle. In the video, one of the plane’s wings appears to clip the ground before the aircraft barrels into a ditch at the side of the road.
“It wasn’t flying. It was just straight went right through the gate, the fence, and then it went right on to the road and then on the ditch,” Chan said. “It wasn’t taking off. It was just going straight, full speed ahead.”
Investigators said the plane was privately-owned and that a male instructor and a female student were inside at the time of the incident.
“Obviously there was a loss of control of the aircraft,” York Regional Police Sgt. Dave Mitchell said at the scene. “Thankfully, there were no injuries.”
Police said that it was “really quite amazing” that the aircraft did not collide with a vehicle on the road.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is investigating the incident.
With files from CTV News Toronto's Austin Delaney
