a student pilot from southern Missouri's Malden Air Base was alone in a T-28 Trojan aircraft when he decided to fly under the bridge. He had allegedly been planning this maneuver for some time, scouting it from the air and the ground. The story goes that the pilot flew under the bridge, pulled into a loop, and narrowly missed the bridge when he flew under the structure a second time, skimming the water and damaging the wings and roughly 12 inches of the outer tips of the propellers. He returned to the air base where he allegedly attributed the damage to a "rough running engine," his eventual confession leading to his removal from the flight training program. Deterioration and repair The bridge would be completely reconstructed in 1983. Since that time, only one significant incident has taken place on the water below. On May 18, 1996, a towboat moving 21 barges upstream bumped a bridge pier damaging the lead barge but not the bridge itself. The structure was further rehabilitated in 2005. On November 29, 2010, in an attempt to slow the deterioration of the aging structure, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) reduced the bridge's weight limit to 15 tons. At that time, roughly 3,500 vehicles traversed the span daily, of which nearly one quarter were tractor-trailers. The signs were largely ignored by truck drivers, accumulating nearly $70,000 of traffic fines in less than three months. In January 2011, the bridge was finally shut down for the entire year, engineers identifying 25 of 108 deck beams suffering significant rust and degradation. The closure caused a 17-mile detour for motorists. Three months later, the area was inundated with water during the 2011 Mississippi River flood. On May 10, the river crested at 47.8 feet in Memphis, topping 46 feet around the Cairo Mississippi River Bridge by May 20. Any depth greater than 43 feet necessitates a closure, but the bridge was already shut down due to the ongoing repairs. The bridge was finally reopened in March 2012. On February 24, 2015, it was announced that the 86-year-old structure needed $3 million in significant joint and beam repairs and general rehabilitation. It was thus closed on March 16, 2015, by IDOT. It was scheduled to be closed for a period of one year until March 18, 2016, but reopened far ahead of schedule on October 13, 2015. On October 10, 2019,