Plane makes emergency landing on Interstate 15 outside Las Vegas

A small plane made an emergency landing on a highway outside of Las Vegas on Tuesday morning, marking the third time in less than a year the aircraft’s owner has had a plane involved in such a grounding.

The plane’s young pilot and sole occupant, who identified himself as Tzuriel Urbano, stood near the aircraft at the side of Interstate 15 near Moapa after it had touched down. He said he had flown the same plane the day before and all had gone well.

The Metropolitan Police Department said in a social media post at 9:24 a.m. that it was helping the Highway Patrol with traffic control following the 9 a.m. emergency landing of a small plane on I-15 at mile marker 82.

“The pilot was able to safely land the plane onto the Interstate without further issues and without injury,” Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Shawn Haggstrom said in an email.

Haggstrom said the Cessna 172 single-engine airplane plane landed after the pilot reported engine troubles and a landing gear malfunction, and that traffic was blocked on northbound and southbound I-15 from mile marker 80 to mile marker 88. By 10:20 a.m., the highway was reopened and traffic was “moving slowly in the area,” Metro said.

A search of the plane’s tail number on the flight tracking platform FlightAware shows it departed from the North Las Vegas Airport at 8 a.m. and circled the interstate nearly a dozen times before touching down. The plane left the area at about 1:25 p.m. and returned to the North Las Vegas Airport 36 minutes later, according to FlightAware.

Logs on FlightAware show the plane has logged dozens of flights since at least Oct. 7. The aircraft is registered to Las Vegas-based Ace of Spades Aviation LLC, federal aviation records show.

Additional details have not been released. The National Transportation Safety Board could not be reached, and the Federal Aviation Administration said that because of a lapse in funding, it wouldn’t be responding to routine media inquiries.

FlightAware data also shows the same plane was involved in an emergency landing Sept. 21 in the northwest Las Vegas Valley. Surveillance footage from a homeowner in the area of Grand Canyon Avenue and Tropical Parkway circulated on social media showed a single-engine plane just a few feet above the ground. No injuries were reported in that landing, according to a spokesperson for the Harry Reid International Airport.

In December 2024, a different Cessna 172 registered to Ace of Spades Aviation made a landing on Kyle Canyon Road near U.S. Highway 95.

In that instance, two people were piloting the plane and landed safely, and were allowed to use the road as a runway to take off back to the North Las Vegas Airport, the Las Vegas Review-Journal previously reported.

Nevada secretary of state records list Thomas Trotter as an officer for Ace of Spades Aviation as well as Vegas Aviation LLC, which describes itself online as a flight school based in North Las Vegas. When reached by phone on Tuesday, Trotter said he wasn’t able to answer questions.

Contact Casey Harrison at charrison@reviewjournal.com. Follow @casey-harrison.bsky.social on Bluesky. Photographer LE Baskow contributed to this report.