(NewsNation) — As soon as the engine quit, pilot Remy Colin knew he was going to lose the plane he was flying over an Orlando roadway.
He spotted a 150-foot landing zone below, an intersection with cars stopped at a red light on either side. His plan was to land on the road in front of the incoming traffic.
“I had to clear some power lines, and as soon as I did, the light turned green,” Colin said of the crash-landing Friday that was caught on video. “The person taking the video is where I wanted to land.”
Making an adjustment, Colin let the plane stall and rolled to the right, crashing into the shoulder of the road before impacting a set of trees in front of a house and coming to a stop.
“I saw a very long driveway and that’s basically (what) I put the airplane toward,” Colin said Tuesday on “NewsNation Prime” as he recounted the crash. He suffered some cuts and bruising on his head but was otherwise uninjured.
Nobody on the ground was hurt.
A pilot with more than 10,000 hours of flight time, this was the worst of the emergencies in which Colin has been involved. The cause of the engine failure was a loss of fuel.
Colin said the plane had roughly an hour and a half of fuel when it arrived at his business for maintenance, but it had apparently leaked fuel when the engine was removed during repairs. When he took off, he had less fuel than he estimated.
“It was my mistake,” Colin said. “I did everything I could to save lives and myself.”
Colin said the investigation has been closed by the Federal Aviation Administration and he has been cleared to return to the sky.