Driver walks away unscathed after plane crashes into her pickup on Calif. highway: ‘Accidents happen’
A California driver miraculously walked away from a freak accident nearly unscathed after a small plane crashed into her pickup truck after the aircraft failed to take off Tuesday.
Single mother Dee Arata, 41, was on her way to work from her Yuba City home when the single-engine Republic RC-3 reportedly hit a fence and then spiraled into her white pickup truck on a backroad around 6 a.m.
“I saw it before it hit, like, seconds, if that, it may have been one second,” Arata told KCRA.
“Like, I saw something out of my peripheral vision, and it looked big and white and so I turned my head, and it was right there. And I knew it was a plane, and I said out loud, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna get hit.'”
Firefighters told the station the crop-dusting plane didn’t get enough air as it tried to take off at a runway near the road, leading to the accident. Neither the pilot nor Arata were badly injured.
“I can’t believe I got hit by an airplane and survived,” she said.
Images from the scene show the truck’s windshield broken and the driver’s side door mangled. The plane was several yards away in a field.
Arata was reportedly driving to her job as an operating room nurse and usually avoids major roads that can be clogged with traffic.
“I would rather take country roads and not worry about the traffic or some car crashing into me,” she told the station.
“I never once thought, ‘You are going to have to worry about planes.’”
Following the accident, Arata was able to get out of her car and only had a limp.
Before she went to the hospital, she even checked on the pilot.
“He’s like, ‘Are you OK?’ And we hugged, you know,” she recalled.
“And he’s like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I was like that’s why it’s an accident. Accidents happen.”
