Landon Lucas

When Landon Lucas managed to make an emergency landing on a New Jersey bridge last month, the recent graduate of Northwest College’s aeronautics program was quick to credit the instruction he’d received.

“I was trained,” the 18-year-old pilot explained to a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I knew how to do it.”

Of course, Lucas’ July 19 stop on the Ocean City-Somers Point bridge was not a part of the standard curriculum offered by NWC and its partner, Choice Aviation.

“We don’t practice that,” quipped Todd Simmons, Choice Aviation’s director of aeronautics.

However, Simmons said they do teach students how to make good decisions in times of crisis.

“You have to ... assess it and make the very best decision you think can be made with what you’ve got to work with. And apparently he [Lucas] did — there was a successful outcome,” Simmons said. “So everybody’s hats off to him.”

The Jackson native became something of a media sensation following the “eye-popping” landing, with numerous news outlets across the country picking up the story; on Fox 29 Philadelphia, a reporter proclaimed Lucas to be “Jackson Hole, Wyoming’s Sully Sullenberger.”

In a sense, Lucas may have done the famed “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot one better, as he avoided a watery landing and set the plane down on the bridge without any damage or injuries.

“I see a gap in the traffic, so I’m like, you know what? I’m going for it,” Lucas explained to Fox 29.

Lucas works as a pilot for Paramount Air Service, towing banner advertisements in the skies above the New Jersey shore. It was during a flight over the Atlantic City area that the engine on his 1946 Piper J-3 began to fail and the plane began falling in altitude.

Lucas quickly ditched his banner and set out for the nearest operational airport, passing over an abandoned airport that was closer, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“It’s a lot easier to aim for the [operational] airport and actually take off again than to land in an abandoned airport or a highway,” Lucas told the Philly paper. “The intention was not to land on a bridge in the first place.”

But the aircraft soon failed completely and he brought the plane down on the Route 52 bridge. It created a stir and backed up traffic — with two gawkers getting in a car crash — but otherwise went smoothly.

“How did you deal with this emotionally?” Fox 29 reporter Hank Flynn pressed Lucas in a live TV interview the following day. “I mean, you’re effectively emergency landing an airplane; you’re 18 years old. Didn’t at some point you say to yourself, ‘My God, if I don’t do this right, I’m going to die?!’”

“You always know if you don’t do something right, you’re kind of done for there,” Lucas offered, without missing a beat.

Simmons, of Choice Aviation, said he’d like to think that all of his program’s graduates have that kind of demeanor in the cockpit.

“Cool, calm and collected is a personality or I guess a disposition of hopefully [all] your professional pilots in the industry,” he said. “It can be a complicated place in the cockpit.”

Lucas started with the joint NWC/Choice Aviation program in 2020 and studied under flight instructors Casey Wagler, Luanna Atnip and Eric Swenson. By continuing to work through the program through the summer of 2020, Lucas was able to graduate with his associate’s degree in aeronautics on May 6; he obtained his certification in just over a year.

“He was in somewhat of an accelerated program … and did a little bit above and beyond what a typical Northwest College student would do,” Simmons said, describing Lucas as both ambitious and outgoing.

At any given time, Choice has 60 to 70 full-time students in training, with roughly 20 to 24 of them enrolled in NWC’s program, Simmons said. Graduates have gone on to pilot crop dusters, air ambulances and commercial airlines, among other successful careers.

“We think all of our graduates or students are heroes in their own rightful way,” Simmons said, though outside of Lucas, “I don’t know of anybody making the national headlines.”

“Great kid, great pilot,” he said of Lucas. “We wish him the best.”