Sometimes, when a teen earns their driver’s license, families celebrate by letting the new driver hit the road with the whole family. It’s a fun, new privilege to get to drive around on your own, and sometimes you just want to show others what you can do under pressure.
This is sort of what happened to 18-year-old Brock Peters, who just earned his license to operate planes — and had to make an emergency landing with his family on board.
Peters was flying a few family members in a single-engine plane to breakfast when he heard a loud, concerning sound while over the Cajon Pass.
"We're coming through the pass and I hear a 'boom' and then I lose all my engine power," Peters told CBSLA.
Due to the terrain, Peters couldn’t get in contact with any air traffic towers. So he called his mom to let her know what was happening and decided to make an emergency landing on the side of the road below them.
"I can hear my grandma crying in the back," he recalled.
"I'm like 'I've got to tune her out, focus on what I need to do and get this plane down safely and make sure everybody is OK.'"
His determination in the moment was needed. Peters recalled to CBSLA that he later noticed power lines over the roads and knew that hitting any of them would have made the situation far worse.
"I was coming down and there was power lines that went across the road," Peters said in the interview. "When I was coming down, I didn't see those until after I got out and checked everything out, that's when I saw the overhead power lines."
Peters has loved flying since he was a young boy and pursued a pilot's license in his teens. He'd had his license for only four months when he was faced with this intense challenge.
"I knew I was going to land it," Peters said. "I knew I was going to. But to not hit anything, that's God's intervention right there."
There were four people on board at the time, including Peters, and thanks to his quick thinking, no one was hurt.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating what exactly happened to the plane’s engine that made the landing necessary.
