Mike Bremner
No pilot wants to be forced to attempt an emergency landing after taking to the skies. However, anyone who ends up in that situation can only hope it goes as smoothly as it did for a guy in California who safely touched down on Huntington Beach after things went awry.
Noncommercial pilots are responsible for a little more than half of the overall flight hours that are recorded in the United States each year, and those flights are responsible for the vast majority of accidents linked to air travel.
According to the NTSB, noncommercial aircraft were involved in 1,126 incidents during the approximately 28.4 million flight hours that were documented in 2024, and around 16% of them resulted in fatalities that claimed the lives of 300 people who were aboard them when they transpired (for the sake of comparison, commercial airlines had just 34 accidents resulting in zero deaths in around 19.8 million hours of flight time recorded over the same period).
That makes sense when you consider pilots only need to log 40 hours in the air to earn a private license from the FAA compared to the 1,500 you need to fly for an airline, but experience only goes so far when you encounter an issue in the skies.
That was the situation one man in California found himself facing after taking off from an airport south of Los Angeles on Monday, but he and his passenger were able to walk away unscathed after he managed to touch down on a popular beach.
A camera mounted on a wing captured a pilot making an emergency landing on Huntington Beach
Pilots are trained to be ready for mechanical issues they might encounter in the air, and it goes without saying you ideally want to find an airport where you can touch down when you find yourself dealing with a problem that forces you to land.
However, it’s not always possible to make it to one, and if that ends up being the case, you need to start scoping out a piece of land (or, in the case of Captain Sully, a river) that has the potential to serve as a landing strip.
According to The Los Angeles Times, that’s the scenario Mike Bremner encountered after he and his 16-year-old nephew took off from John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana on Monday afternoon. They were planning on making their way up to Van Nuys, but those plans were derailed around five minutes into the flight when the plane’s engine gave out at around 1,000 feet in the air.
Bremner, who flies corporate jets for a living, issued a Mayday call and started scoping out potential landing spots after determining a return to the point of departure was not in the cards. He found one in the form of an empty stretch of sand on Huntington Beach, and the camera that was affixed to the right wing of the plane captured him descending before successfully touching down.
Pilot with his teen nephew take an unexpected visit to the beach after being forced to make an emergency landing at Huntington Beach in California.
The pair took off from John Wayne Airport when the engine broke down at about 1,000 feet, just 5 minutes after takeoff.
“When that… pic.twitter.com/ARUevW0E4T
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 28, 2026
Bremner and his nephew were both able to walk away from the plane entirely unscathed (a small portion of the beach was closed after authorities responded to the scene), and the pilot said he won’t think twice about getting back into the air in the wake of the scare.