Aircraft Makes Emergency Landing At Eastern Peripheral Expressway Near Ghaziabad - See Pics (Photo Credit: ANI/Twitter)
New Delhi:
A small, twin-seater aircraft made an emergency landing on the Eastern Peripheral Expressway near Ghaziabad village on Thursday. Indian Air Force officials have reached the spot. Initial reports suggest that the plane belonged to the NCC. It’s Zenair CH 701 trainer aircraft, latest reports say. Both pilots and co-pilots are said to be safe. The photos tweeted by news agency ANI showed damages to the left wing of the small plane. The plane made emergency landing after it developed technical snag, latest reports said.
An aircraft made an emergency landing on Eastern Peripheral Expressway near Ghaziabad’s Sadarpur village today, after it faced a technical problem.
— News Nation (@NewsNationTV) January 23, 2020
📸: ANI
For more updates, visit https://t.co/FKiTwn4lh5 pic.twitter.com/qnxwRySoAp
Though the plane may have made emergency landing on the expressway due to technical snag, it is not the first time that an aircraft landed on road in India. In 2015, a Mirage 2000 fighter jet of the Indian Air Force landed on the Yamuna Expressway that connects national capital Delhi with Agra early on May 21, 2015. At that time, the IAF had also released a statement. The entire exercise was seen as an attempt to develop major roads as landing strips. The air force said in a statement had said that the aircraft flew in from a base in Madhya Pradesh and made a "practice approach on the highway, coming down to a height of 100m before landing off the next approach" in Uttar Pradesh.
A 2017 report had said that the Indian Air force has cleared 12 National Highways (NHs) as emergency landing airstrips that will enable rescue operation teams to reach affected areas easily. Although there was initially a proposal to develop a total of 21 NHs into airstrips, for now 12 highways have been cleared, with three of those connecting Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh -- all Maoist-affected areas, which also witness vagaries of nature like floods and cyclones almost every year.
Among the 12 NHs cleared for being developed into airstrips are: Jamshedpur-Balasore highway and Chattarpur-Digha highway -- both touching Odisha --, the Kishanganj-Islampur highway in Bihar, Delhi-Moradabad highway in Delhi-Uttar Pradesh, Bijbehara-Chinar Bagh highway in Jammu and Kashmir, Rampur-Kathgodam highway in Uttarakhand, Lucknow-Varanasi highway in Uttar Pradesh, Dwarka-Maliya highway in Gujarat, Kharagpur-Keonjhar highway in West Bengal and Mohanbari-Tinsukia highway in Assam.
