There was no time for Jaime Pawliuk to take his foot off the gas as a plane smashed into the car ahead of him and then barrelled toward his – all he could do was wrench his wheel right to swerve into the nearby ditch.

He says the sudden manoeuvre on a busy thoroughfare in Prince George, B.C., on Thursday afternoon created just enough space to avoid the plane’s propellers from slicing through his vehicle and, likely, him, but the plane’s wings still shaved part of the roof of his cab.

One person in the car ahead of him died from the impact, authorities confirmed.

The twin-engine turboprop charter plane was en route to Prince George’s airport when it lost power to one of its engines and made an emergency landing on Foothills Boulevard, a major arterial road in the northwest corner of the city, the Transportation Safety Board said. The plane hit four vehicles, injuring several people on the ground, though there were no injuries among the aircraft’s pilot, crew member or six passengers.

Mr. Pawliuk, a 42-year-old security guard, was driving up Foothills Boulevard to start a week-long shift about 160 kilometres north in Mackenzie when the plane crashed, “appearing from nowhere,” he said in an interview.

The only sound he heard was the twist of metal and the shattering of sunroof glass. He walked away from the crash with only minor cuts from the flying shards. Processing the incident won’t be easy or quick, Mr. Pawliuk said.

“It’s not something that’s supposed to happen. It’s not really something that you should make sense out of,” he said.

“It’s just an absolute accident that happened.”

The Transportation Safety Board, which is on scene investigating what led to the crash, said the flight originated from the Sturdee gravel airstrip. The remote facility is about 650 kilometres northwest of Prince George and serves nearby mining operations.

Toronto-headquartered Evergold Corp. confirmed on Friday that two of its staff were on board alongside employees of other mining companies working at various sites in the north of the province. The two Evergold employees were being transported south for a scheduled break from work on the company’s northern B.C. mining project.

BC Emergency Health Services sent two ambulances to the crash scene shortly after the emergency landing around 2 p.m., paramedic public information officer Brian Twaites said in an e-mail. It treated 10 patients, including two people who were transported to hospital in stable condition.

TSB spokesperson Nic Defalco said in an e-mail that the Beechcraft King Air 200 airplane left the Sturdee airstrip at roughly 1:25 p.m. before it lost power to one of its engines.

Mike Morris, a former MLA and long-time Mountie in the area, raced to the scene of the crash from his home a couple minutes away and saw officers blocking off the road. The boulevard has two lanes for traffic going up the big hill where the plane landed and one coming down.

Mr. Morris, a former RCMP commander in the north of the province who then served as solicitor-general under the previous B.C. Liberal government, said the pilot of the craft appears to have manoeuvred well through a difficult emergency.

“There were eight souls on board that aircraft – all of them were able to get out of there,” Mr. Morris said in an interview. “He did a very good job, it’s just unfortunate we had a death and other injuries.”

The Prince George Airport was alerted to the incident and was preparing to receive the airplane for an emergency landing before it travelled toward Foothills Boulevard, the airport authority said in news release on Thursday.

The plane has been registered to Sekani Air Ltd., a northern B.C. chartered airline, since October, 2025, according to Transport Canada records.

Someone who picked up the phone at Sekani Air’s Prince George headquarters on Friday morning said the company is not commenting on the incident.

In 2024, a different airline owned the plane and called in a mayday outside of Kelowna’s airport while conducting the medical evacuation of a patient from Phoenix. After the oxygen masks dropped down during the plane’s descent, the pilot was able to land it safely during that night in January, 2024, according to Canadian aviation records.

An inspection found a knob controlling the pressure had incorrectly been turned to the maximum level, but no defects were found in the plane, according to online records from Transport Canada’s Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System. Upper Valley Aviation Ltd., the Chilliwack, B.C. airline that owned the plane at the time, did not answer when called.