United flight landing in Newark strikes light pole on New Jersey Turnpike, FAA says

*Final Destination 8: Surviving Jersey*

Same as the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.

And sent to bed without supper.

Gotta love that every time something like this happens, people think that “near death experience” is a multi-million dollar cause of action.

But that’s the issue is most of these cases. You build things around them and make situations like this even possible. I’m not saying the airport was built close to everything, but like you mentioned, everything crept up to them.

I also suspect that this particular road was established long before that particular runway ran right up to it. Maybe the issue is that we invest in our country's infrastructure as if a one-size fits all approach will work. These airports get overloaded with various flights - private jets, commercial passenger airlines, commercial freight companies, etc. If we were to take a more holistic approach and consider train travel (both freight and passenger) as a higher priority investment, the DOT could specific what types of planes are allowed in each airport and reduce the traffic demands & need for additional runways for those airports. These large urban airports should be almost exclusively large passenger planes flying in and out. There is no specific reason to have all the commercial freight traffic or smaller private jet traffic coming in as well - there are plenty of small airports in NJ, NY, PA, CT to handle the smaller planes. There is no specific reason to have commercial freight traffic flying in to EWR either. Specifically looking at NJ, the freight train network seems to be very weak or underutilized. They should be able to bring freight into the tri-state area through existing networks without needing to rely on Newark, JFK, or LGA for any freight. As another example, the airport in the small town I grew up in has a 10,000 foot runway. It's mostly used for the air force, but FedEx also uses it. There was not enough demand for passenger flights. However, it's pretty strange that there hasn't been any investment to hook the freight train network to the airport to take stress off other airports in the region. The town has great weather for flying: clear skies, no window, consistent temperatures, etc. But the US makes it so difficult to improve existing rail infrastructure that it just sits empty most of the time.

I’m not saying build airports in the middle of nowhere. A plane shouldn’t be descending right above a turnpike to land. The videos show planes flying like 30 feet above the turnpike and this one flew lower and hit a light pole. Imagine if the airport had 1/4 more of a mile of space. This incident wouldn’t have occurred.