Sep. 20—A plane made an emergency landing in a field west of the Vance Brand Municipal Airport on Sunday night, making it the third to land in fields near the airport this year.

Between 9 and 9:30 p.m., a single-engine Cessna Skyhawk experienced engine trouble and landed in the 6900 block of St. Vrain Road, according to Boulder County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Carrie Haverfield. Only the pilot, who was not injured, was in the plane, which was minimally damaged, Haverfield said.

The plane, with the tail number N738HD, is owned and operated by Aero-Sphere, a flight school with a location at the Longmont airport, according to its website.

The plane took off from Vance Brand, 229 Airport Road, at 9:13 p.m., according to online flight tracker software FlightAware.

Annette Nusser, who owns the property where the plane came to rest, said the plane came very close to damaging her barn and horse trailers, with animals inside. It stopped having only bent a fence post, she said. Not even the field where the plane landed was damaged.

She did not know what had happened until the pilot came and knocked on her door to tell her about the emergency landing.

Nusser has spent 16 years on her farm and has never had a plane land in her field. This year, though, she has heard of two other emergency Cessna Skyhawk landings on nearby land.

On May 4, a student pilot suddenly lost engine power and crash-landed in a field near North 75th Street and St. Vrain Road. The pilot managed to get out of the plane uninjured, but the plane somersaulted over a fence and landed on its top. The plane had taken off from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield en route to Longmont.

On April 12, another plane had engine trouble before landing in a field, according to the Aviation Safety Network, a flight incident tracker. This plane also departed from the Rocky Mountain airport.

Nusser said she was shocked when the pilot told her about the landing. She said she wonders if aircraft issues or inexperienced pilots are contributing to the crashes and emergency landings.

Levi Brown, Vance Brand Airport manager, said these types of incidents are not uncommon.

“We’ve had a pretty safe airport,” Brown said, audibly knocking on wood over the phone. He said he has never experienced a fatal crash at Vance Brand in his three-year tenure.

Although Brown has not experienced fatal crashes on airport property, Longmont’s airport has been associated with at least three deaths, according to Times-Call coverage.

In June 2024, a plane that took off from Vance Brand crashed in Steamboat Springs, killing both people inside and setting two homes on fire. In January 2024, a man died in a skydiving incident when neither the skydiver’s primary nor reserve parachute deployed.

The airport’s residential neighbors have also complained for years about Vance Brand and the noise that its planes make. In a November 2024 City Council meeting, most of the roughly 20 people who signed up to speak at public comment expressed concerns with the airport. Brown, during that meeting, cited 264 noise complaints regarding the airport up to that date in 2024.

Brown recalls two or three emergency landings happening last year. What has changed recently, he said, is increased attention on incidents. But, the airport itself is safe, he said, and aircraft are held to incredibly high maintenance standards.

Flight school aircraft — which make up nearly half of Vance Brand’s air traffic, Brown said — get even more inspections than other aircraft, he said. In addition to the standard annual inspection they get, flight school aircraft get the same inspection every time the plane hits 100 hours of air time. That doesn’t always mean problems can be prevented, though.

“I’ll relate it to driving a vehicle,” Brown said. “Sometimes, things just happen. Things break that you didn’t know would break.”

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