Over in another thread, Qadgop the Mercotan, to make a point, mentioned offhand a plane crash he survived, and it sounded very harrowing. To avoid a hijack in that other thread, I know a lot of us would be very interested in the details . . . If it’s not too ooky for you to talk about.
Wow! Here’s another Doper waiting on the edge of his seat. Thanks for opening this, Eve. I missed the other thread, and wouldn’t have even known about it.
I was just about to say that. I say if often.
I thought I did a thread on it years ago, but I couldn’t find it.
Basically, it was running out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas all at the same time. Pilot error.
“Pops” Mercotan and I were up in our old Fairchild PT-26, an old low wing army trainer, built circa 1942. It wasn’t quite open cockpit, but had a sliding canopy, which we usually kept open as to feel the wind in our faces and the bugs in our teeth. In fact, it looked a lot like this plane: http://www.elivermore.com/photos/Events/air_app03_10.jpg
It was a warm august afternoon back when I was 16, and Pops and I had taken off from my uncle’s airstrip. I was in the rear cockpit, Pops was in the front, and we were just playing around. I took the plane up to about 5000 feet because I wanted to see across lake michigan. As we began our slow descent, Pops decided to play flight instructor, so he pulled back the throttle, and hollered “forced landing! Where you gonna go?” This is a maneuver every student practices, just in case the engine actually does conk out. Well, I noted we weren’t too far from uncle’s airstrip, so set up a glide pattern to take us back there. And we drifted lower and lower.
Now keep in mind that Pops wasn’t actually a flight instructor and while I had a training certificate, it wasn’t for this plane. Our Fairchild was a great training plane if the intercom worked, but the 67 and a half volt battery it required had recently died, and we had been forced to communicate with each other by hollering thru a vacuum cleaner hose strung between the two cockpits. For exchange of information, we depended mostly on hand signals and habit.
Which is why, when we got down about 300 feet, and Pops suddenly waggled the joystick while saying something or other, I thought he was taking over the piloting again, as was the usual habit. Unfortunately, he didn’t start flying the plane, I stopped flying the plane, and we stalled out and augered into an oatfield, about a half mile short of the runway. My last airborne sight was the ground rushing up at me, and my last airborne thought was “I’m going to die”.
We hit on the nose and the left wing. The left wing tore off and we rolled upside down. Fortunately they built those old trainer planes very sturdy (they knew those draftees fresh off the farms in WWII would not be gentle), and provided a roll bar. We plowed the oat field with our roll bar for about 40 feet, then flipped upright again. The framework of the plane (wood, metal, and fabric) shattered around us, and absorbed a lot of the impact, rather than crumpling like aluminum. The wooden propellor was an impressive hub surrounded by a million splinters. We’d been developing full engine RPM when we hit, in a hopeless effort to regain airspeed and avoid Mr. Oat Field.
We ground to a halt. No fire. I slowly came to, surprised as hell to not be dead. Then I felt a significant amount of pain. I’d been speared in the left thigh by a jagged metal rod. It turned out that the rod opened my femoral artery sheath without opening the artery or any other structures. Which was good. Had it opened the artery, I’d have bled to death quite quickly. The rod then proceeded under the skin and almost, but not quite came back out to the left of my navel.
My left humerus had been smashed neatly in two at midshaft also. That was unpleasant. I had a huge flap of scalp torn off my head and hanging in my eyes, my lower teeth had been driven thru the skin beneath my lower lip, poking out the other side. I had countless other lacerations too.
But the greatest pain was in my mouth. I’d bitten a hole completely thru the center of my tongue. Gosh, that hurt. A lot.
Pops had banged his head on the ground when the plane flipped. Cracked 3 cervical vertebrae. Dislocated an ankle too, but that was small stuff compared to the neck. Amazingly he did not sustain spinal cord damage, but had tons of complications during his hospitalization and surgery.
So we sat on the ground, until rescue showed up. While waiting, I did remove the metal rod from my leg. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I had twisted in my seat and it had pulled mostly out, so I just instinctively finished the job. I tried to walk out of the plane, but collapsed in the oats. They were washing oats out of my wounds later that day. The Flying Dutchmen Rescue Squad (that was their unofficial nickname, most were from the local High School whose teams were called that) had been inaugurated just the previous week, and we were their first bonafide medical emergency. They pried Pops out of the wreckage and took us to the hospital.
All I needed was a lot of cleaning up, sewing up, and casting. Damn, sewing that tongue back up hurt a lot a lot a lot!! Then recline in a hospital bed and get fed pain pills while watching game shows. They kept me for a week! Nowaways I’d be lucky to be kept overnight for observation. The future Mrs. Mercotan visited me to soothe my fevered brow.
Pops made a 90% recovery over about 1 year, and we even returned to flying again. That was in a Stearman N2S3 a lot like this one: http://www.minterfieldairmuseum.com/N2S3z.jpg
But Moms Mercotan wouldn’t let him get it until Pops gave up smoking. Which he did.
The FAA investigated. Pilot error, laid at the feet of Pops, who was the pilot in command, and the only licensed pilot in the plane. He accepted responsibility gracefully, and never made me feel guilty about it. And I never developed any fear of flying at all.
Landing, on the other hand…
Whoa! What a story. :eek:
Thanks for sharing. I always grip my seat when we’re landing (now I’ll be thinking of you and this story, too, now).
Damnation! I’m glad you’re still with us for a time, Doc.
How odd to hear a MD describe in detail the extent of his injuries.
Glad you both made it through!
That first pic looks a lot like the plane James Garner’s character stole in The Great Escape
Wow!!
Ouch…just thinking about a hole in the tongue gives me the whillies.
Glad you survived your adventure.
The scar on his forehead’s still there, and if you get him to stick out his tongue, you can see that scar, too! Very cool.
And no, I’m not afraid of flying either. 
:eek:
Amazing.
BTW, this isn’t really relevant, but since this is a thread about you, I figure I’ll say it here: I hope every doctor I have is like you, Qadgop the Mercotan.
Did you ever find out what your dad was trying to do/tell you when he waggled the stick and shouted at you?
…you had a rod open up the sheath of your &%$#@ femoral artery, and nearly take you out of the game altogether, but then you just gripe about how much your tongue hurt.
Yeah, he’s a doctor all right.
He said that he hollered: “We’re getting kind of low and slow”. He denied giving the stick a waggle, and it may have been pre-stall turbulence that did cause it.
Thanks, fetus. I hope you get a good doctor. May you never need a good prison doctor, however.
Wang-ka, I only found out about the severity of the impalement later. That wound barely hurt at all, compared to the white-hot pain in my tongue.
The tongue healed up fastest of all my injuries. The day after the accident it was still swollen 3 times normal size. But within a week, it was hardly noticeable. But since part of the tip was left numb, it did take a while for me to talk properly again.
Good story!
The bit about the leg injury reminded me what happened to my younger brother while we were in high school. We lived on the White Oak River in NC (part of the intercoastal waterway). Mark was riding around in a small boat with some friends. He was young, stupid, goofing off and fell off the boat. He was run over with the propeller and his femoral artery was exposed but not cut. The doctor said if the injury had been a tiny tiny fraction of an inch deeper, he would have died in the water before he could be rescued.
He did end up with a very interesting series of scars. The propeller hit one leg, and caused a series of slashes from his ankle nearly to his important bits (which was the first thing he told me when I saw him in the hospital, that he almost lost his balls!).
The irony, of course, is that some people now pay a lot of money to get their tongues pierced – Qadgop, I guess you were ahead of your time.
I found a thread mentioning our favorite prison doctor’s crash here but I’m not sure if that was the one he was looking for.
Qadgop, you’ve been in some… uh… *interesting * threads on this board. It makes me feel so… ordinary.
Wow.
That is all I can say.
Wow.
So, was the hospital stay the experience that made you want to be a doctor?
Nah. I knew that before the crash. It just re-inforced it. The surgeon seemed to be having so much fun chatting up the nurse while he sewed my leg and my tongue up.
That’s an amazing story! Even more amazing is that you got into a plane and were flying again a year later!
I think I’d spend the next long while cringing every time I heard a plane pass overhead!