I am one of those white-knuckle fliers. I really hate to fly, but do. Look at where I have lived and you know I didn’t get there by train. I am getting better about flying, but still…
I know statistically that flying is one of the safest means of transportation, but was just wondering if anyone on the boards has ever seen an actual plane crash - other than a video snippet on the news.
Have you ever witnessed a plane crash in real life, not on the news/video?
Yes.
My cousin and I decided to go out after a night of drinking and fly his ol’ RC plane in the fields outside our hometown. It was a rickity looking Wright-esque number and it flew like a cow with a rocket strapped to it.
As it screeched towards the ground… the horror… the horror…
I believe a Doper was in one in a private plane (the good prison doctor I think) but he can say for sure.
Yes. I was working in the control tower at an AF base when a B-58 crashed during takeoff killing all three on board and it was a horrific experience.
My supervisor immediately left the tower to more closely view the carnage and returned holding a dead pilot’s flight helmet. I will never forget the image of his standing there proudly clutching this ‘treasure’ with a look on his face of total satisfaction and accomplishment. I doubt he understood the look on my face that said, "“You’re a complete moron.”
Yes.
I saw a Chipmunk fly into the ground having attempted a half roll followed by a half loop with insufficient height to recover. Here’s a video of it, I was standing just across the runway from the impact point. The pilot didn’t survive.
I’ve also seen a P40 Kittyhawk have an undercarriage failure on landing and was one of the first at the scene of an off field crash landing of another P40 that had suffered an engine failure. The pilots in both of those incidents were ok.
I saw an ultra-lite crash. It was going along, straight and level, then a control line snapped and it pitched down nose-first into an “outside loop”. It was one of those “pilot sits out in front” tri-cycle jobs. The first thing to hit the ground was the pilot’s head. Sounded like a canatlope hitting the ground, kind of a wet “pop”, followed by a crunch. :eek:
His wife/family was standing fairly close by us when this happened and it was pretty horrible. :eek:
I didn’t see the first seconds of the crash, but was at the window on 9/11 watching the Pentagon burn. It wasn’t pretty.
I have seen literally hundreds of car crashes. I’ve seen at least fifty actually happen, been in two, and like I said, hundreds, maybe even thousands that I’ve passed on the road minutes or seconds after they happened. At least three were new enough that I called them in in case nobody else had.
yes.
during an airshow. Two F-4s (it was a looong time ago) collided. The F-4s carried only one pilot for this purpose. Both pilots ejected, one was killed.
I don’t think Dulles continued to host air shows after that.
Heard one crash. (Posted about this years ago on the board.)
I heard a small plane coming in real low over the house with obvious engine problems. (A spurt-spurt sound.) Went right over our house very low. The propeller hit the top of the trees next to our deck. Mrs. FtG and FtGKid2 saw the tree debris falling. The pilot managed to pull up and make it a little way farther before crashing. Didn’t make it.
My mom was driving us down a country highway, and we pointed out the cool biplane in the air. Suddenly it started trailing smoke. It attempted to climb, but it stalled out, and went into a nose-dive. My mom gasped, “Oh, God. He’s gonna crash!”
At the last moment, the pilot pulls up and cuts the smoke. We drive a few more hundred yards past the entrance to an airshow.
My maternal grandfather had his pilot’s license, and once way back when Mom was a kid, they had to make a crash landing in a corn field when their little prop plane got surrounded by thunderstorms. That’s stuck with her.
Personally, no, thank goodness. My F-I-L first heard a low flying B-1B in trouble, then saw him bank and start to go down trailing smoke and fire. He crashed on the place next to ours. Previous thread.
My niece was driving home in Austin and witnessed the disgruntled taxpayer’s suicide by plane into the IRS building just a few hundred yards in front of her.
I"ve seen two. Both at EAA Airventure in Oshkosh. The last one was a couple of years ago. Two Mustangs collided during a formation landing. Video Here
Several years before that, I saw a Corsair hit another plane while landing. THe other plane was taxiing across the runway.
I was present at the airport for the crash of Delta 191 in August of 1985.
At the time my dad worked for Frontier, and my mom and I were flying out to Denver that evening. Dad was unable to get vacation time and was not coming with us. We were early and I believe Dad was actually working that day. So, we were downstairs in the operations area below the passenger gates (can you imagine that happening these days?)
A British Caledonia flight was taxing from east to west directly north of Frontier’s gate. All of the sudden a fireball and smoke cloud billowed up behind the Brit Cal. plane. At first everybody thought it was on fire, but it did not take long to discover what had happened. The thunderstorm that brought down the airliner hit the terminal at about the same time as the radio went crazy.
I got to watch as flights were diverted to Love Field in Dallas and the guys scrambled to get buses to bring the passengers to DFW and get everybody taken care of. At the time, Frontier was also working the flights for another airline or two, they were busy to say the least.
Did eventually make it on a flight out that night. Oddly, there was enough room for standby passengers. The landing in Denver was usually bumpy, but the pilot that night put the plane on the ground smoothly.
I’ve seen a couple.
First one was about an hour after my first flight lesson - saw the trainer on take-off roll go nose first into the runway. Results were one broken nose, some cracked ribs, and a broken airplane. I ran out to render help along with some other bystanders. (If you’re curious - I showed up on time the next week for my lesson. No, I’m not particularly paranoid about crashing).
I’ve seen aftermath of crashes, too - one memorable one was when some guys were salvaging a wrecked Long-EZ at my local airport. They were muttering about never being able to get the blood out of the safety harness and finding chips of the pilot’s femur embedded in the fuselage (probably happened at the same time pieces of the fuselage became embedded in his thigh). They did manage to save his injured leg, he only has a slight limp, and after about two years he went back to flying.
I’ve heard people go down over the radio, too. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they don’t.
Now, OP - why does a white-knuckle flyer want to hear eyewitness stories of crashes? Are you looking for reassurance they aren’t always fatal, or do you want to scare yourself into never flying again?
I was in one.
It wasn’t fun.
Watched an F-4 crash at an air force base. I just happened to be standing in the parking lot. Apparently lost power on downwind; Both pilots ejected, but sadly, they were too low. Neither survived.
I remember reading about when your Dad did a loop in his open cockpit plane, looked back to find you, didn’t see you and feared all the way down that you’d fallen out. Have you written about the crash here on the Dope?
Yeah, those stories are here somewhere. I’m not able to search for it (or other aviation anecdotes) at the moment, however.
I missed the crash itself – and more interestingly, misinterpreted what I did see – but I saw the wreckage of Air Florida Flight 90 within minutes of the plane crashing into the 14th Street Bridge.
I was idly looking out the window of an office building, waiting for one of my parents to finish work, and saw a lot of commotion and some wreckage on the bridge. I thought it was a bus crash, though, not an airplane crash.
Although the important thing is the lives lost. that was also an epically bad day to commute:
It took us 6 hours and 5 minutes to get home. Incidentally, my father and I missed that fatal Metro train by a few moments because my farecard did not have enough money. While we were adding money to the card, the train pulled out, and we had a looong wait for the next one. I saved that farecard for years but cannot say where it is now.
