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The Las Vegas [Landing] Strip?

Las Vegas, Nevada, Sin City, Stories
Posted May 5th, 2007 by Christopher - Add comment

There are some strange things that happen in our fair city – Mayors telling school kids his favorite pastime is drinking gin, hookers forming unions, holes in the desert – you name it, we’ve either had it, got it, or will probably get it before long. One thing I have not seen yet is Las Vegas Boulevard being used as a runway…

Plane after it crash-landed on the south Las Vegas Strip

Last night, we had some very typical (for this time of year) strong, gusty winds around the valley. Being a private (student) pilot, myself, I’m always watching the planes come and go as I go about my day or night around town. Jets on approach into McCarran International Airport last night were coming in on the southwestern approach and had a pretty strong, quartering headwind out of the northwest, so they were crabbing into the wind as they were about to land (you can see them doing this when it looks like the nose of the plane is not pointing straight at the runway, but into the wind to allow for a straight-line ground track on final approach.)

For small planes, particularly if you’ve been on a cross country flight in windy conditions, you might be expending a lot of your fuel going into a headwind but not getting much of a relative ground speed at all because the wind moving over your wings is not just from the propeller pulling you through the air, but also the wind blowing straight at you as well, and you have to fight through that to actually go anywhere. Ever seen a bird on the beach almost motionless in the air when flying into the wind but remaining airborne? Planes do that too, to a lesser extent.

I’m no rocket scientist, but I’d suspect that this was a contributing factor as to how the pilot who thought he had enough fuel to make it into the airport didn’t make it and ended up on South Las Vegas Boulevard missing a wing. He ran out of gas and totally almost hit my old apartment!

Apparently there were no serious injuries, but that plane is done. They were out there sawing it into pieces to put onto a trailer and tow off, most likely for further investigation by the NTSB. Whatever damage was done to the plane, though, had to be nothing compared to the damage to this guy’s ego. He should have put that thing down in Jean and refueled! He’s seriously lucky, though. The plane and its occupants came to a stop almost directly under some huge, high-tension power lines, near the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Warm Springs.

All of that craziness and last night was only a Friday… Today it’s Saturday, Cinco de Mayo, and the Oscar de la Hoya-Floyd Mayweather, Jr. fight all rolled into one big money night! It should be a good one, for sure.

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