At approximately 5:30pm on Sunday, a commercial lorry parked on a street in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, achieved something no amount of paperwork, permits, or pre-flight checklists had previously authorised: powered-adjacent lift. Footage of the vehicle toppling in the howling winds of Typhoon Dolphin has now been formally entered into evidence by the International Institute of Cargo Aerodynamics (IICA), a standards body that insists it has existed since 1987 and would very much like everyone to stop asking for its founding charter.
The storm itself was in no mood for half-measures. Typhoon Dolphin came ashore near Yuhuan with sustained winds of roughly 151 km/h, prompting more than a million evacuations across the region and the cancellation of hundreds of flights, as Sky News reported. Authorities also issued flood and landslide warnings across Zhejiang as the system pushed inland, per Al Jazeera's photo coverage of the storm. Amid all this, footage verified by the BBC shows the lorry lifting, rotating, and settling on its side with the unhurried confidence of a vehicle that has simply decided this is now its angle of repose.
"Under Statute 4.2(b) of the Overland Vehicle Airworthiness Code, which we drafted this morning, any land conveyance whose wheels leave the tarmac for a cumulative period exceeding zero seconds during a named weather event is retroactively an aircraft," said Dr. Mildred Yaw, IICA's Director of Unplanned Ascents. "This lorry did not file a flight plan. It did not squawk a transponder code. Frankly, it didn't even fold in its mirrors. The implications are, frankly, terrifying (see footnote 1)."
New filing requirements announced
Dr. Yaw's committee has proposed that all cargo vehicles operating within 500 kilometres of a named storm system now carry a laminated flight plan, a co-pilot's licence for the passenger seat, and — in a clause she described as "non-negotiable" — a small tray table that can be stowed for landing.2 The proposal further recommends that lorry drivers caught in future gusts radio air traffic control before, rather than after, becoming briefly airborne.
