Take driver Simon Li. He was tootling along in rush-hour traffic about 20 miles north of downtown Seattle earlier this week when a small plane hit the deck right in front of him.
His dash cam caught the dramatic moment as the aircraft — a single-engine Piper PA32 — exploded on impact. Incredibly, no one perished in the accident, though a couple of people were hospitalized.
Local reports suggest the plane lost power shortly after takeoff, prompting the pilot to go for an emergency landing on a boulevard that at the time happened to be free of traffic. But as Li’s footage shows, the plane unluckily clipped a set of lights on a gantry just before touching down, bringing the short flight to a fiery end.
Li’s footage joins a growing list of lucky escapes captured by car-based cameras, as a cursory search on YouTube shows. Take this clip from Taiwan shot a while back that shows a driver inches from being flattened by a giant boulder that rolled off a mountain during a storm.
Dash cams are a growing sector of the tech market, with more and more drivers choosing to record their journeys in case of an incident or accident — or some spectacular event that could become the next viral YouTube video. The global dash cam market was worth nearly a billion dollars in 2014 and is estimated to grow to $1.84 billion by 2022.
Interested in getting your own? Then take a moment to check out Digital Trends’ recent pick of some of the best offerings on the market today.
