‘Mayday’: How many planes have landed on Lake Shore Drive?

John Pedersen was on a solo sunrise flight around the Loop when his single-engine, fixed-wing RANS S-6 Coyote II started shaking violently.

“O’Hare tower: mayday,” he said to air traffic control. “We are going down on Lake Shore Drive. This is a mayday.”

It was around 6 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013, when he successfully landed his plane in the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive near Jackson Street and Buckingham Fountain. No one was hurt, but Pedersen said two vehicles struck his left wing after he landed and drove off.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of traffic,” Pedersen later told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I thought it was the safest place to put the plane down.”

Pedersen is not the only pilot who has ever made an emergency — or “forced” — landing on a Chicago area road. He’s not even the only one who’s ever landed on DuSable Lake Shore Drive, Chicago’s famous, scenic multilane expressway.

Why would the Drive make for the best option during an emergency? What’s going through a pilot’s mind when they’re choosing where to land? An emergency landing can seem like a snap judgment, minutes or seconds in the making. But the decision of where to land is often backed up with the help of an air traffic controller, years of training and a whole lot of luck.

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday’

Another pilot named John landed on Lake Shore Drive on July 18, 2018.

“Everything was good up until the moment that it wasn’t,” pilot John Ginley told Curious City.

Ginley and his copilot Ally Gilbert were taking in the sights of downtown Chicago on their way home to Ohio after the annual air show in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin.

Their aircraft was a rental: a single-engine, blue-and-yellow Ercoupe built just after World War II.

When they were about 1,000 feet above downtown Chicago, near Soldier Field, the engine “rolled back significantly,” Ginley said. He checked the throttle, the fuel mixture and everything else he was trained to look for that could remedy the problem. Nothing responded.

That’s when the airplane started to descend, and he made the decision to alert air traffic control at the nearest airport.

“Midway tower: Ercoupe 9-9-0-5-5. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

Ginley told air traffic control he would not be able to make the roughly 8-mile journey to Midway Airport, so they asked if he could make it to Lake Shore Drive.

“There were a couple other [landing] considerations, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them viable options,” Ginley told Curious City.

They debated landing on one of a few nearby baseball fields but scrapped the idea due to their relatively small footprints. They considered the beach but scrapped that idea too, for fear of hitting beachgoers out on a beautiful summer afternoon. They thought about a water landing in Lake Michigan.

“Obviously, Sully did it,” Ginley said, referencing pilot Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s 2009 emergency landing in New York’s Hudson River. “But in this kind of a small general aviation airplane [with] tricycle gear … there was a very good chance of that airplane flipping over on its back. And if that happens, your odds of survivability go way down.”

Ultimately, Ginley said they wanted a landing site as flat as possible, something that looked like a runway, and something that did not pose a danger to the public. He ended up in the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive near 38th Street. No one was injured.

“He should have been a seamstress, because he knows how to thread a needle,” said former Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford, who was one of the first officials on the scene.

Langford said Ginley pulled off one more feat of aviation prior to landing: avoiding the 35th Street pedestrian bridge. Ginley said he didn’t have enough engine power to fly over it, so they went under it.

“He literally went under the bridge with a 14-foot clearance and landed this aircraft,” Langford said. “And I just looked at him in amazement. I don’t know who taught you to fly but you should be teaching others.”

Ginley also gave credit to Gilbert, his co-pilot — now Ally Ginley after the two married in 2021. She had received her private pilot certificate just two weeks before their 2018 forced landing. Ginley said she helped by checking the engine gauges, looking for an appropriate place to land and pointing out the pedestrian bridge as they made their final approach.

“She said, ‘Johnny. Bridge,’” Ginley recalled. “I was focused on the roadway and Ally saw the bridge.”

Two LSD landings in the last 15 years?

After searching newspaper archives and aviation incident reports from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, it seems that Pedersen and Ginley are the only two pilots to land on Lake Shore Drive. Curious City sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FAA in September but has not yet heard back as of publication due to the federal government shutdown.

Both DuSable Lake Shore Drive and flight in general have been around since the early 1900s, which makes the relatively small number of landings on the Drive seem a little odd. Two in the last 15 years — and none in the hundred years prior?

There may be a simple explanation for that: Meigs Field.

The small downtown airport sat right at the water’s edge on Northerly Island until 2003, when Mayor Richard M. Daley had it destroyed under the cover of darkness.

But for over 50 years, it was a perfect alternative to Lake Shore Drive if you were a pilot in trouble, according to Steve Whitney, a local pilot and still technically president of The Friends of Meigs Field.

“Even if it’s not an emergency per se, you can land there, sort out whatever problem it is and keep going,” he said.

Northerly Island no longer makes for a good landing spot, with its trees, hills, lagoon and music venue. Still, Whitney isn’t surprised by the small number of forced landings on DuSable Lake Shore Drive since the closure of Meigs Field.

“Here’s the thing: Airplanes are generally very reliable,” Whitney said. “They don’t go bad very often.”

Other non-airport landing spots

Paul Durica at the Chicago History Museum found reports of several atypical landing sites over the past 100 years.

“It’s almost always either engine failure or the plane runs out of gas,” Durica said.

Durica pointed to an emergency landing in Belmont Cragin’s Riis Park in 1937, another on Interstate 80 near Gary, Indiana, in 1977, and several on Lake Michigan, including a Learjet owned by Mutual of Omaha that splashed down in March 1966. Local golf courses occasionally played the role of makeshift runway too.

In 1981, pilot Edward G. Tapling abandoned his initial plan of landing in the Marquette Park Golf Course on Chicago’s Southwest Side when he saw a large number of golfers on the course. He put the plane down in a nearby rose garden instead. One of the two men onboard was a pastor at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. “Thank God,” said Rev. John Ormechea as he walked away from the wreckage, according to the Chicago Tribune.

A representative from the agency that rented Tapling the plane commended the pilot’s actions, telling the Tribune, “Any time you land in the city and walk out of it, you’re doing a good job.”

“That, I think, kind of perfectly describes all of these instances,” Durica added, “just because of all of the challenges in making an emergency landing.”

Ginley and his copilot were rattled by their emergency landing but not deterred. A few weeks later, they got back in the air.

“You got to get back on the horse,” Ginley said. “And so, we rented an airplane and we went up and we flew around for an hour — just to fly around, just to say we could — and we came back and landed.”

These days, Ginley is an FAA-designated pilot examiner; he assesses prospective pilots to determine if they have the skills necessary to earn a license.

“Good for him,” said Langford upon learning the news. “Now there’s an example of federal bureaucracy working.”

Langford said it is very unlikely that a Chicago commuter would be confronted with an emergency plane landing in their lifetime. Nonetheless, what should you do as a motorist if you see an aircraft attempting to land while you’re driving on DuSable Lake Shore Drive?

Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications asks that you call 911.

Meanwhile, Langford said you should act like the motorists did the day John Ginley landed.

“People saw him coming and they got out of the way, which is what I would do if I saw an aircraft in my rearview mirror,” he said.

Justin Bull is a producer for Curious City.