Brazilian police car rams smuggler's airplane

According to its title, this video shows a Brazilian police car ramming the wing of a smuggler's small twin prop airplane. A commenter named pvbernhard translated the dialogue:

0:13 - I'm going to hit the wing - I'm going to hit the wing. Do not shoot.
0:23 - Drop one there. [one police officer get out of the car] I will get the others.
0:27 - Police! Get out! Get out!

Policia Federal Bate com Carro na Asa Do Avião Pata Impedir Fuga De Suspeitos 01 11 2011 YouTube

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MORE: automotive • aviation • brazil • crime • video • youtube

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Hubris Sonic

Oh.. I saw this episode of NCIS
noah django

sweet, dude! i’m for drug decriminalization, but i gotta admit, that cop sure is good at his job. i’ll bet after work he drank a pint of whiskey and wrassled gators to unwind.
blendergasket

They’re gonna have to resell those drugs to pay for the windshield.
- dsouto
  
  Wind Shield damage costed around R$400. The total in eletronics confiscated on the airplane R$200,000
deliciouspineapples

I think the real issue here is that once you get to the point in events where you’re ramming your car into a planes wing, the phrase ‘Do not Shoot’ should no longer be part of you vocabulary. You passed that point a couple of miles back.
- Nathan Popham
  
  Well, I don’t know how combustible plane fuel is, but usually it’s kept in the wing. Probably not a good idea for your partner to start shooting as you violently bust open a fuel tank.
snagglepuss

Ballsy. Maybe not as ballsy as the guy who jumped out of the car without any cover and approached the plane, but still pretty badass.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Abdul-Alhazred/100000416725737 Abdul Alhazred

I would watch this show every week.
Blaze Curry

how desperate is that? but desperate for what exactly? to stop the smugglers potentially at the cost of his own life? I could see it if there were slaves on that plane…but for drugs?
No, that guy is either an idiot or has something he thinks of as worse than injury or death
hanging over him.
Probably both.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  I probably wanted the drugs so he could sell them himself.
  - GTMoogle
    
    Freudian slip there Nathan? :D
    - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
      
      Hah – I could tell you that I started the sentence with ‘I think that he’, and when shortening it wasn’t paying enough attention; but I wouldn’t respect you if you believed me.
- dsouto
  
  I would not say desperate. The police had been investigating this for about one month. in the mean time they talked with many pilots to learn what was the best way to prevent a plane to take off. Every pilot said “Hit the tip of the wing”
  
  The airplane and the car was going in the same direction so the crash, was about the same as low speed crash.
SamSam

Wait, isn’t this a clip from Face/Off?

(Yes, I did remember to spell that with a /, thank you).
Tom Pappalardo

This is exactly how my Wednesday mornings usually go, too.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_FKHDCIS27XPE6ZFY6MWMN5UYRQ grima

Aviation, yo!
http://twitter.com/cshotton Chuck Shotton

Single engine, btw. Looks like a Cherokee 6.
philipbarrett

And I thought he was going to jump onto the tail as the plane took off, climb through the cabin and get into a fist fight with the pilot.

Well that’s what Hollywood would do isn’t it?
dculberson

My understanding is that the plane was used to transport stolen electronics, not drugs. They would land, drop off the electronics, and take back off right away. That’s from the Jalopnik post about this:

http://jalopnik.com/5855780/watch-a-police-officer-stop-this-plane-with-his-car
- Marko Raos
  
  Stolen electronics, eh? Most probably hard-drives considering what’s going on with Thailand… This war on drugs crap has gone soo old I’d love to see a show about electronics smuggling.
  (And my inner geek would flourish too)
  - dsouto
    
    I don’t think they were stolen. Most likely they were legally bought in Paraguay (where the plane was going to pick up the eltronics) and then smuggle into Brazil.
  - deliciouspineapples
    
    That’s a thing.
    
    While it’s hardly drug smuggling levels of corpses and money, smuggling things like consumer electronics, tabacco and booze tends to be worth a lot of money and produce more dead people than you think.
    
    So think of that next time you buy a cheap hard drive. The blood of…I dunno…probably some Canadians or upstate New Yorkers will be on your hands. Maybe a guy in Hong Kong got his balls cut off over it.
awjt

The driver and the guy who jumped out of the car were probably on coke. Oh wait.
xzzy

Bruce Willis taught me the best way to prevent a plane from taking off is to puncture a fuel tank and light the trail of fuel with a match.

These guys are amateurs.
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

“Just open it up, Julio – what’s the cop going to do? Try to ram us?”
Guest

Okay, so the NEXT Michael Bay movie will have the 8 explosions?
vonbobo

“Hey asshole, why don’t we use your side of the car if we are going to ram an airplane?”
Guest

Chuck Norris would have stopped it with his teeth
- joeposts
  
  Chuck Norris would have torn that wing off with a stern glance.
Guest

That looks like 2 or 3 cops, hardly a brazillion.
Mister44

Just like thug cops, destroying property with out due process. Where was their warrant? Hope they didn’t kill anyone.
- dsouto
  
  The police were investigating this for about a Month. So Plenty of time to get the warrant.
Jane D

Yes, It’s a Cherokee six (PA-32) and it feels very staged. On takeoff roll, that guy would be far enough down the strip to rotate into ground effect (pop up 8 feet of so for non aviators).

His car closes awful fast on a plane accelerating towards launch, too.
I don’t see the plumes of dust that a prop kicks up on a dirt strip, either.

All I see is hooligans smashing a nice plane.
- Guest
  
  any chance they’re taxi-ing and entirely unaware of the impending collision?
  - Jane D
    
    Hmm. The prop is spinning so slowly they might be taxiing downwind for an upwind launch. Still, I learned to look around when on the ground…
    - arifyn
      
      We don’t get to see what the plane is doing for very long. It might even be possible (if the police car was hidden near the airstrip) that they intercepted it near the end of a landing roll.
      
      Certainly a waste of a plane, but ramming the wing seems preferable to what the policeman riding shotgun was considering…
Marc45

It’s not a twin prop…geez what ever happened to proofreading
http://profiles.google.com/jveteran John Veteran

Seriously, can you count the props? There must be a hidden one… :-)
ackpht

I’ll guess the pilot didn’t know the car was there, since planes don’t have rearview mirrors and that plane didn’t seem to be under takeoff power (and little or no flaps). Risky due to the wing fuel tanks, though.
technosean

Do you know where the gas tanks are on those planes? The wings. What these folks did was asking to be in the center of a fireball.

Go after the tail. No gas there, and the plane still won’t fly.
Bevatron Repairman

The plane’s flaps aren’t deployed (maybe to 10 degrees? but not 25 or 40, the other two settings), so it’s unlikely he was on a take-off run or had just landed. Rather, I’d guess he was taxiing to the far end of the runway in order to take off the other way. And, as noted, no rear view mirror.