A small plane nearly crashed straight into the ground, and a hiker caught the whole thing on film. Jason Dunn was hiking up to Devil’s Thumb in Grand County, Colorado when he saw something that he’ll likely never unsee—a near-miss that was almost catastrophic.
“While sitting in the saddle on the ridge at the top (the Continental Divide), a plane came up the valley from the opposite (Boulder) side,” Dunn wrote in his Facebook post dated July 4. “It was clear the plane was struggling trying to clear the saddle. It was coming straight at us, and as a former licensed pilot, I was worried it would go into an aerodynamic stall. Then it either did, or the pilot made a last ditch effort to turn the plane around in a dead end valley before crashing into the mountain (or us).”
Dunn’s son was standing at a different point on the ridge, and he was the one who actually captured the footage.
“There’s a plane!” Dunn’s son says in the video. “Oh my God! It’s like right there!”
After hurtling toward the ground, the plane maneuvers parallel and does not crash. But it was so, so close. Too close.
“As you can see, [the pilot] made it by less than a couple of feet,” Dunn concluded.
Watch it here:
We can’t even imagine what it must have been like inside the cockpit of this plane.