Plane Sets Down on Riviera Fairway

A single-engine plane that had trouble landing at the Santa Monica Airport instead set down a few miles away on a fairway at a premier golf course in Los Angeles. The plane's three occupants were unharmed in the emergency landing Friday afternoon at Riviera Country Club in the Pacific Palisades area, KTLA reports. The reason for the plane's difficulty was not yet known, Los Angeles fire officials said, and an investigation has begun. At nearly the same moment, a small plane with only the pilot aboard overshot the runway at the Fullerton Airport, southeast of Pacific Palisades, and crashed into fencing, per KTLA. The pilot's condition was not announced.

The storied Riviera course has hosted three majors and has the 2026 US Women's Open, 2028 Olympics, and 2031 US Open on its schedule, per Yahoo Sports. It's not unheard of for plane landings to interrupt play at golf courses. Actor Harrison Ford was injured in an emergency landing at another nearby course after taking off from Santa Monica in 2015. Golf Digest has video of the bumpy Riviera landing that it posted on X. (More emergency landing stories.)