A plane carrying American soldiers crash-landed on a highway outside Uganda's capital Kampala on Friday, "miraculously" causing no injuries, said security officials said. The small plane carrying six soldiers from Entebbe airport to neighboring South Sudan, was forced to turn back due to bad weather and then land on a highway, after running out of fuel approximately 40 miles from the airport.
"Nobody was hurt. There were eight passengers including the pilot and co-pilot," said Paddy Ankunda, Uganda's army spokesman. He attributed the lack of casualties to Uganda being "full of miracles." "Definitely there must have been a bit of luck. A highway is not a place for aeroplanes, so they were lucky to find no vehicles," he added.
It was unclear why the military personnel were heading to South Sudan - the world's newest country in the grips of a civil war - and US Embassy staffs were not available for comment.
"In the airspace in South Sudan it was established that the weather was actually bad and it affected the visibility and the pilot was not able to trace its way," Freddy Enanga, Uganda's police spokesman, told The Telegraph.
"The fuel that they had actually ran out at a village called Kiwawu along Kampala highway," said Enanga, "The pilot soft landed there in the middle of the road. There was no traffic there which enabled him to land safely." "It's a major highway - but it's not as busy as Entebbe highway."
Emergency teams from Entebbe International airport were quickly dispatched to refuel the fixed-wing craft so that it could return to base, Enanga added.
Ankunda also said that this was the second time a plane had landed on one of the roads between Kampala and Entebbe. According to him, last year, a plane flown by an American also crash-landed with no casualties.
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