Driver uninjured after plane and pickup truck collide on California highway

A California driver miraculously emerged almost unscathed from a bizarre accident on Tuesday when a small plane crashed into her pickup truck after it failed to take off.

Single mother Dee Arata, 41, was on her way to work from her Yuba City home when the single-engine Republic RC-3 reportedly struck a fence on a side road around 6 a.m. and then crashed into her white pickup truck.

“I saw it before it hit, about seconds, maybe even a second,” Arata told KCRA.

“I saw something out of the corner of my eye, it looked big and white. I turned my head and there it was. I knew it was a plane and said out loud, ‘Oh God, I’m getting hit.'”

Firefighters told the station that the crop duster did not get enough air when it tried to take off from a runway near the road, leading to the accident. Neither the pilot nor Arata were seriously injured.

“I can’t believe I was hit by a plane and survived,” she said.

Pictures from the scene of the accident show that the truck’s windshield was broken and the driver’s door was demolished. The plane was lying several meters away in a field.

Arata was reportedly driving to her job as an operating room nurse and normally avoids busy main roads.

“I prefer to drive on country roads and not worry about traffic or a car hitting me,” she told the broadcaster.

“I never thought, ‘You have to worry about airplanes.'”

After the accident, Arata was able to get out of her car and was only limping.

Before she went to the hospital, she even checked on the pilot.

“He said, ‘Are you OK?’ And we hugged, you know,” she recalls.

“And he said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I thought that’s why it was an accident. Accidents happen.”