A teenage pilot who crash-landed a plane on a busy Florida highway while completely avoiding disaster says “you just run” when he finds himself in life-or-death situations.
“It can happen … very quickly,” Niko Bray, 19, said in an interview with Florida news outlet WSVN, nearly a week after authorities said he landed the small plane he was flying on a six-lane road in the community of Jupiter due to an emergency in the sky.
Bray earned his pilot’s license in January 2025, works as a flight instructor, and was flying a Cessna 150G over Jupiter on the afternoon of March 6 when he detected his plane had an engine problem, the Palm Beach Post reported.
In the WSVN interview, the suburban Palm Beach Gardens resident said his plane had lost power and he realized his best chance to get out of his plight alive was to try to land on Indiantown Road.
“I realized like, ‘No, this is real… I don’t really have any power to escalate right now,’” Bray said over the outlet’s airwaves in comments that garnered attention across several U.S. news markets. “I started looking at the ground immediately to find a place to land, and once you’re in that position, you just execute.”
Bray positioned the Cessna near a Home Depot store at the intersection of Indiantown Road and Maplewood Drive, in view of motorists who were recording videos of the extraordinary scene on their cellphones.
He told the Palm Beach Post: “It was less than two minutes from the time I realized there was a problem landing on the ground.”
No one was injured, which Bray attributed to a man in a truck slowing people down while making the emergency landing. Bray expressed his gratitude to that viewer on television, saying, “If you’re watching this, sir, I want to thank you for what you did.”
Bray described traveling the road in question “hundreds of times.” He continued: “Turning it into an airport for a day…wasn’t what I expected to do.”
A standard Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigation was pending when Bray shared his mental state on the emergency landing.
Whatever his findings, he said on WSVN that the experience reminded him to “never take (anything) for granted.”
“It’s nothing with your family,” Bray commented. “You never know when the last day you’ll be able to talk to your parents or your family will be, so when you have that time with them, enjoy it.”
