If you’re having mechanical issues with your ride, sometimes the best place for that is in front of a farmhouse. But what if your ride is a plane?
Savannah Jones was moving pipe on the family farm with her mom and siblings when she saw a plane coming down low.
“I was like, oh my gosh, they're going to crash,” Jones said. “And then it just sat down, landed right in the field right where we were moving
pipe.”
Someone else called the downed plane in, but where?
Logan-Cache airport manager Bob Low said the mayday call helped.
"That was heard by the dispatcher at USU flight school," he said. "It was heard by other aircraft in the air."
Utah State University Flight school students and instructors helped locate the plane, out in farmland between Smithfield and Richmond.
Low said the pilot was cool under pressure in the rented Cessna 172.
"He chose a field where it was a hard packed surface, minimal obstacles," he said. "He assessed where power lines were, where fences were, where water lines were.”
The pilot did seem calm, but he did not want to be recorded before Low gave him and his passenger a ride back to Logan-Cache Airport.
"It was a memorable experience," Savannah Jones said. "I’ll remember moving pipe and watching a plane touch down in the field right next to us.”
It got more memorable on Monday morning.
“We heard this engine roaring outside of our house," she said. "And at first I was like, what tractor's falling apart out there?”
It was the Cessna 172, again. Jones said two civilian vehicles blocked 1600 West.
“It seemed like they knew what they were doing,” she said.
Jones got out her phone and recorded the plane getting up to speed and taking off from the road.
Jones was nervous about the power lines, but not the short cut wheat fields, or the traffic.
“There was only like two cars that got stopped because of the plane taking off," she said.
It’s something the pilot and some wheat farmers will not soon forget.
“It's a good two truths and a lie to tell," Jones said. "Watched a plane take off right in front of my house.”
