Plane from my flying club makes emergency landing
Apparently, a Piper Warrior flown by my flying club, Northwest Aviation, experienced an engine failure shortly after takeoff and was forced to land on the Elgin-O'Hare expressway. Scary stuff -- sounds like the instructor tried to get the plane back to the airport but lost power too far out in the pattern to return to the field. I've never flown the Piper Warriors they have in their fleet — I'm partial to their Diamonds and the late-model Skyhawk SPs — but these are generally very reliable, easy handling aircraft forgiving of most mistakes, so this must have been an extremely unfortunate scenario.
The news report calls it a 1985 Warrior, but apparently it's a 1983 model. (Pretty cool that Google links directly to these pages if you enter an "N" number as your query.)
Sounds like instructor John Vashko did some pretty impressive work to get the plane down on the expressway without a) hitting cars or b) injuring himself or his student beyond "minor injuries, cuts, and abrasions." Remind me to triple-check those gauges during my next engine run-up procedure. It's so easy to get lazy and careless about your routine as a pilot when everything seems perfectly ordinary.