Commercial Airliner Clips Truck During Wild Landing at Newark Liberty International Airport

A truck driver is thanking his lucky stars after a commercial airliner clipped the top of his vehicle while coming in for a landing at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The plane, a 221-passenger United Airlines flight from Venice, Italy, dropped so low that a wheel hit the truck traveling on the airport-adjacent New Jersey Turnpike, according to The New York Post.

Harrowing video from inside the truck shows the moment the plane crashed into it.

On the video, the driver, Warren Boardley Jr., is seen belting out a tune when a screeching roar grows louder and louder. At the last moment, he glances up as one of the jet’s wheels strikes the truck’s window — sending glass flying.

Miraculously, the 39-year-old suffered only minor lacerations in the May 3 crash, while no one on the Boeing-made jet was injured.

“To me, that everybody on that plane, everybody and the driver, God was looking after them, there’s no doubt,” said Chuck Paterakis, co-principal at H&S Bakery, which owns the delivery truck, via KATV.

A United representative added, per CBS News: “The aircraft landed safely, taxied to the gate normally and no passengers or crew were injured. Our maintenance team is evaluating damage to the aircraft. We will conduct a rigorous flight safety investigation into the incident and our crew has been removed from service as part of the process.”

The wild incident is only the latest in a string of catastrophes and near misses involving commercial aviation.

As the National Enquirer reported, 67 people perished on Jan. 29, 2025, when a Blackhawk military helicopter collided with a commercial jet outside Washington, D.C., in one of the deadliest crashes in U.S. aviation history.

And in March, a packed Air Canada Express flight collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, killing both pilots and sending 39 people to the hospital.

As experts previously told the Enquirer, the incidents are a worrying consequence of aging — and, in some cases, obsolete — infrastructure, dire shortages of air traffic controllers, record levels of flight traffic clogging the skies, and the diminishing skills of pilots too reliant on computers.

“Roughly a decade ago, commercial aviation was about 10 to 12 times as safe as the next safest mode of transportation, or trains,” says Vance Hilderman, the founder and CEO of AFuzion, an aviation safety certification company. “But that factor has now fallen to about five or six times as safe, given a variety of reasons.”