7 ms·

Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0]. He sold his plane about 15 y

by mdip 5y ago

Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0]. He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in bad weather[1]. He was traveling with his daughter, a friend and, I think, his wife. He died, but his daughter was able to get free and make her way to a nearby farm to call for help. Looking at the plane, the fact that anyone survived at all let alone walked to a nearby house with minor injuries is pretty miraculous. It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. I have no idea the kinds of structural technologies are involved in the aircraft but I know his plane was made in the 70s and was light enough that he only had a pole which attached to the front landing gear to pull it out of the hangar. The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted. [0] I'll spare the details as I have left many comments in the past about his experiences. [1] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/43894 https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/43894 - "Pilot Error"; I recall my Dad saying "all plane crashes are pilot error" [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-32_Cherokee_Six https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-32_Cherokee_Six

qayxc 5y ago
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I think you overlooked an important factor there. The plane was indeed designed to realistically seat 7 adults. The issue is that in the 50 years since the plane was originally designed, the average weight of adults (in the US) increased by about 18% [0] and the average adult woman today weighs as much as the average adult man in the 1960s. [0] https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/2015/06/15/id/650546/ https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/20...
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I find it very hard to agree that a PA-32 was "designed to realistically seat 7 adults". I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load, but rather a max of 4 adults and 2 kids and a typical of 2 adults and 2-4 kids. It is one of the more roomy cabins among light singles, but every one of them that I see for listed for sale right now is configured with seating for only 6, which is great for 2 adults and a few kids.
  - travisjungroth 5y ago
    The point of the person you're replying to is that people have gotten bigger, which is a fact. Pointing out the comfort of levels of people in airplanes today doesn't dispute that. It used to be more common to have a flexible combination of seats/baggage/fuel. But pilots flip out (or crash) if they can't fill the tanks, every seat and the baggage compartment and come in under gross. So the same airplanes often don't have the "bonus seats" they used to. Numbers from Wikipedia, from the 1972 PA-32 owners handbook: 3,400 lb gross - 1,788 empty - (4 hours * 15gph * 6 lbs) / 7 passengers = 178 lbs per passenger. The average adult in the 70s was about 160. So you're not going across the country, but you could safely do a day trip with a 90 minute flight each way. Now the average adult is 180. And they're a little taller than they were in the 70s, but not much. So every passenger has an extra 20 pounds horizontally. So in 2021, you'd be just over gross except that the people can't actually fit in the airplane.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Have you ever seen the optional 7th seat for a PA-32? It makes for 3-across in the back row which makes the backseat of a 911 look positively roomy.
      - travisjungroth 5y ago
        I just looked at photos. Yes, it's very small. Here's a Piper ad from 1966 with seven adults and their bags: https://i.imgur.com/fWyArRH.png https://i.imgur.com/fWyArRH.png "The SIX will carry up to seven adults and their luggage - in real comfort" And here's an ad from 1969 with six adults in it (and some rifles. a different time!) https://i.imgur.com/kGMrENf.png https://i.imgur.com/kGMrENf.png I can't read into the minds of the engineers who made the airplane. Maybe it's true "I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load". But we can see that the marketing department at least tried to make people think it was.
AdrianB1 5y ago
In aviation load and range are always a compromise, you can fly short distance with a higher load (all passengers) or a longer distance with less passengers. The combined passenger weight and full tanks weight is always more than the Maximum Take Off Weigth (MTOW). For example the small plane that I fly the most has enough fuel capacity to fly around 2000km, but if I will the tanks I need to fly alone, there is no reserve even for a backpack. When I took my brother for a flight around the airstrip I had 20 liters of fuel in the tanks 'cause he is heavy (for an European). I have a couple of friends that each crash landed at least twice in the past 10-15 years; one was in the hospital once, for the rest of the incidents they simply walked. In two cases it was engine failure, in one a stuck landing gear and the hospital one had an external factor.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Did his wife survive?
- osenthuortuh 5y ago
  The second link is the crash report. There were four occupants and only one fatality, so only he died. Looks like he tried to land in bad weather, descended before he could see the runway, and clipped some trees. Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.
  - karlkatzke 5y ago
    Yes, those cumulogranite clouds are dangerous.
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    > Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation. Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further—pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s. From my shallow study of fatal and non-fatal GA accidents, there is hardly ever such a combination of life-or-death urgency and absence of alternative transportation options besides flying that could justify risking one’s own life and lives of one’s passengers by wilfully or accidentally ignoring weather forecast, and yet too often that appears to be the case. It’s not a pleasure to talk about incidents like that, but “all plane crashes are pilot error” strikes me as a decent framing of the situation to adopt as a pilot when considering a risky flight.
    - wingspar 5y ago
      Another famous case of bad judgement resulting is JFK Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_crash#Investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_cras...
    - mdip 5y ago
      Without reviewing your profile, I'm just going to guess you're a pilot or you know pilots -- just from this: > Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further--pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s. My Dad says "it's always pilot error" and backs them up with statements like this. And he accepts that fault on himself. These are obvious things, too -- in the case of this crash, the pilot was VFR rated and as my Dad harshly put it "had no business being where he was in that weather". But he really meant everything is the pilots fault. I heard him explaining to someone that there's ultimately no other valid excuse. When his engine failed over Lake Michigan, it was pilot error because he didn't have the necessary instruments to detect a common engine condition that would have prevented him from taking off had he known it was happening. I think it's a little extreme, but frankly, I want the person flying my plane to have that attitude for themselves!
hirundo 5y ago
> It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again. Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  thirty foot jump as a passenger in a 4-seater here at 10,000 feet in the mountains - I hear you! :D
- mdip 5y ago
  I'm glad my Dad's not flying any longer. He was doing very long (multiple stops for re-fueling, flying on some form of breathing tank[0]) trips. He can go on for hours (and we let him) about stories of how he almost didn't make it home due to X or Y[1]. And he joked that every gauge/gadget on the dashboard that didn't come with the plane was there because "if I had it when X happened, X wouldn't have happened" (...or I wouldn't have left the ground knowing the condition existed, or it would have warned me with well enough time to get to safety before I have to be met by emergency vehicles on the tarmac). Funny enough, he would get a little uncomfortable flying commercial. I'm not sure if he was putting on a show for us kids or if he was serious but he'd say he "didn't like someone else in charge of the plane". My Dad flew GA (alone) a few times a week most weeks, so he was unusually experienced for a small plane pilot. [0] He had a breathing apparatus that allowed him to fly at higher altitudes in the unpressurized cabin, IIRC, but I'm not a pilot. [1] Except, when he tells it, he was never in any danger. Doesn't matter if he's hanging an arm out the window trying to manually spin the prop, "it was always under control.". Uh huh.
  - davidgould 5y ago
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted. I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have. Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft. They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get. In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong. The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.
- marvin 5y ago
  I know that glider maintenance procedures in my country call for redoing the center of gravity measurents after painting. Might have been related?
  - inoffensivename 5y ago
    In the US, the FAA requires recalculation of the weight and balance unless the change is "negligible", which AC 43.13-1B defines as "any change of one pound or less for aircraft whose weight empty is less than 5,000 pounds". I think the commenter was making the point that the weight of the paint is not a significant consideration, not that recalculating the weight and balance after a paint job should not be done.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  I'm building an experimental, and we tend to re-do weight and balance after painting. An elaborate paint job can add 30+ pounds and can shift your CG rearward. The regs don't require it, but many builders do it anyway.
ip26 5y ago
It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite Went up in a four man single engine chopper once. It had all the reassuring solidity of a bicycle. Never again. I can’t even imagine what the truly tiny ones are like.
- lbriner 5y ago
  I had a lesson in an Ikarus C42, which although it looks like a "normal" light aircraft is made of kevlar over aluminium and is officially a microlight. It is a 2-seater but the weight is so low that if you are travelling with a passenger, there is a weight limit. I think I worked out that my 6'3" boss was too heavy to fly with an instructor. It was actually pretty fun but, of course, the weather is everything. I can't imagine how bad it would be in any wind more than about 5 knots but on the day I had my lesson, it was calm and clear.
- mdip 5y ago
  I did one of those chopper tours over a big city one time in a splurge. Yeah, I hear ya. I was surprised at how similar the feel is. Your bicycle analogy made me laugh -- spot on. I used to love taking my macho friends up in my dad's plane. There's this moment after take-off where my Dad will comment on "how smooth the air is" ... it's either "perspective" or a pilot joke, I'm not sure, because said "smooth air" is about as bad as reasonable air-turbulence on a jet and the flight is usually marked occasionally by the kind of turbulence that would have the overhead bins tossing luggage onto passengers. I recall a humorous incident where my buddy Tim dropped an F-bomb over a hot mic on the headset when we got smacked sideways.
rubicon33 5y ago
There is a similar story in rally car safety. In the 80s and 90s going off the road at high speeds almost certainly meant death or serious injury. By comparison, there are some horrific crashes today that drivers are walking away from. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/YpNdoV6xv2s https://youtu.be/YpNdoV6xv2s
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
BashiBazouk 5y ago
I once witnessed an airplane crash that everyone survived. I was a preteen hanging around outside the Scotts Valley roller rink with a friend in the early eighties. The roller rink is next to the now defunct airfield. The airfield was lower than the rink by an embankment. We had recently been watching Jaws on Betamax and my most persistent memory is seeing only the tail crossing the field. It reminded me of a shark fin moving through the water, as the embankment was high enough that I could not see the body of the plane. Then bam, the plane hit the embankment right in front of me, caught air then crashed nose down. I think the plane was a Piper but my knowledge of small craft is limited. It was definitely a wing under. My friend ran to get his father and we all ran over to the wreck. My friend's father opened the doors and everyone but the pilot was able to get out by themselves. The pilot had hit his head on something and his face was covered in blood but alive. I found out from press reports later that was the only time I "met" Steve Wozniak. Edit: just looked it up. The plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing this story. Well structured, great ending.
- ZeljkoS 5y ago
  https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple-history-steve-wozniak-in-plane-crash/ https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple-history-stev...
dehrmann 5y ago
> how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite The two "small" planes I've ridden in were a Cessna and an L-39. The Cessna felt like a toy, and the L-39 was a serious piece of hardware. Landings were also very different; the Cessna just got tossed around a lot more.

by mdip 5y ago

qayxc 5y ago

> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I think you overlooked an important factor there. The plane was indeed designed to realistically seat 7 adults. The issue is that in the 50 years since the plane was originally designed, the average weight of adults (in the US) increased by about 18% [0] and the average adult woman today weighs as much as the average adult man in the 1960s. [0] https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/2015/06/15/id/650546/ https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/20...

sokoloff 5y ago
I find it very hard to agree that a PA-32 was "designed to realistically seat 7 adults". I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load, but rather a max of 4 adults and 2 kids and a typical of 2 adults and 2-4 kids. It is one of the more roomy cabins among light singles, but every one of them that I see for listed for sale right now is configured with seating for only 6, which is great for 2 adults and a few kids.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  The point of the person you're replying to is that people have gotten bigger, which is a fact. Pointing out the comfort of levels of people in airplanes today doesn't dispute that. It used to be more common to have a flexible combination of seats/baggage/fuel. But pilots flip out (or crash) if they can't fill the tanks, every seat and the baggage compartment and come in under gross. So the same airplanes often don't have the "bonus seats" they used to. Numbers from Wikipedia, from the 1972 PA-32 owners handbook: 3,400 lb gross - 1,788 empty - (4 hours * 15gph * 6 lbs) / 7 passengers = 178 lbs per passenger. The average adult in the 70s was about 160. So you're not going across the country, but you could safely do a day trip with a 90 minute flight each way. Now the average adult is 180. And they're a little taller than they were in the 70s, but not much. So every passenger has an extra 20 pounds horizontally. So in 2021, you'd be just over gross except that the people can't actually fit in the airplane.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Have you ever seen the optional 7th seat for a PA-32? It makes for 3-across in the back row which makes the backseat of a 911 look positively roomy.
    - travisjungroth 5y ago
      I just looked at photos. Yes, it's very small. Here's a Piper ad from 1966 with seven adults and their bags: https://i.imgur.com/fWyArRH.png https://i.imgur.com/fWyArRH.png "The SIX will carry up to seven adults and their luggage - in real comfort" And here's an ad from 1969 with six adults in it (and some rifles. a different time!) https://i.imgur.com/kGMrENf.png https://i.imgur.com/kGMrENf.png I can't read into the minds of the engineers who made the airplane. Maybe it's true "I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load". But we can see that the marketing department at least tried to make people think it was.

AdrianB1 5y ago

In aviation load and range are always a compromise, you can fly short distance with a higher load (all passengers) or a longer distance with less passengers. The combined passenger weight and full tanks weight is always more than the Maximum Take Off Weigth (MTOW). For example the small plane that I fly the most has enough fuel capacity to fly around 2000km, but if I will the tanks I need to fly alone, there is no reserve even for a backpack. When I took my brother for a flight around the airstrip I had 20 liters of fuel in the tanks 'cause he is heavy (for an European). I have a couple of friends that each crash landed at least twice in the past 10-15 years; one was in the hospital once, for the rest of the incidents they simply walked. In two cases it was engine failure, in one a stuck landing gear and the hospital one had an external factor.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Did his wife survive?

osenthuortuh 5y ago
The second link is the crash report. There were four occupants and only one fatality, so only he died. Looks like he tried to land in bad weather, descended before he could see the runway, and clipped some trees. Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.
- karlkatzke 5y ago
  Yes, those cumulogranite clouds are dangerous.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  > Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation. Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further—pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s. From my shallow study of fatal and non-fatal GA accidents, there is hardly ever such a combination of life-or-death urgency and absence of alternative transportation options besides flying that could justify risking one’s own life and lives of one’s passengers by wilfully or accidentally ignoring weather forecast, and yet too often that appears to be the case. It’s not a pleasure to talk about incidents like that, but “all plane crashes are pilot error” strikes me as a decent framing of the situation to adopt as a pilot when considering a risky flight.
  - wingspar 5y ago
    Another famous case of bad judgement resulting is JFK Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_crash#Investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_cras...
  - mdip 5y ago
    Without reviewing your profile, I'm just going to guess you're a pilot or you know pilots -- just from this: > Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further--pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s. My Dad says "it's always pilot error" and backs them up with statements like this. And he accepts that fault on himself. These are obvious things, too -- in the case of this crash, the pilot was VFR rated and as my Dad harshly put it "had no business being where he was in that weather". But he really meant everything is the pilots fault. I heard him explaining to someone that there's ultimately no other valid excuse. When his engine failed over Lake Michigan, it was pilot error because he didn't have the necessary instruments to detect a common engine condition that would have prevented him from taking off had he known it was happening. I think it's a little extreme, but frankly, I want the person flying my plane to have that attitude for themselves!

hirundo 5y ago

> It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again. Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.

mistrial9 5y ago
thirty foot jump as a passenger in a 4-seater here at 10,000 feet in the mountains - I hear you! :D
mdip 5y ago
I'm glad my Dad's not flying any longer. He was doing very long (multiple stops for re-fueling, flying on some form of breathing tank[0]) trips. He can go on for hours (and we let him) about stories of how he almost didn't make it home due to X or Y[1]. And he joked that every gauge/gadget on the dashboard that didn't come with the plane was there because "if I had it when X happened, X wouldn't have happened" (...or I wouldn't have left the ground knowing the condition existed, or it would have warned me with well enough time to get to safety before I have to be met by emergency vehicles on the tarmac). Funny enough, he would get a little uncomfortable flying commercial. I'm not sure if he was putting on a show for us kids or if he was serious but he'd say he "didn't like someone else in charge of the plane". My Dad flew GA (alone) a few times a week most weeks, so he was unusually experienced for a small plane pilot. [0] He had a breathing apparatus that allowed him to fly at higher altitudes in the unpressurized cabin, IIRC, but I'm not a pilot. [1] Except, when he tells it, he was never in any danger. Doesn't matter if he's hanging an arm out the window trying to manually spin the prop, "it was always under control.". Uh huh.
- davidgould 5y ago

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted. I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have. Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft. They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get. In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong. The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.

marvin 5y ago
I know that glider maintenance procedures in my country call for redoing the center of gravity measurents after painting. Might have been related?
- inoffensivename 5y ago
  In the US, the FAA requires recalculation of the weight and balance unless the change is "negligible", which AC 43.13-1B defines as "any change of one pound or less for aircraft whose weight empty is less than 5,000 pounds". I think the commenter was making the point that the weight of the paint is not a significant consideration, not that recalculating the weight and balance after a paint job should not be done.
ryandrake 5y ago
I'm building an experimental, and we tend to re-do weight and balance after painting. An elaborate paint job can add 30+ pounds and can shift your CG rearward. The regs don't require it, but many builders do it anyway.

ip26 5y ago

It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite Went up in a four man single engine chopper once. It had all the reassuring solidity of a bicycle. Never again. I can’t even imagine what the truly tiny ones are like.

lbriner 5y ago
I had a lesson in an Ikarus C42, which although it looks like a "normal" light aircraft is made of kevlar over aluminium and is officially a microlight. It is a 2-seater but the weight is so low that if you are travelling with a passenger, there is a weight limit. I think I worked out that my 6'3" boss was too heavy to fly with an instructor. It was actually pretty fun but, of course, the weather is everything. I can't imagine how bad it would be in any wind more than about 5 knots but on the day I had my lesson, it was calm and clear.
mdip 5y ago
I did one of those chopper tours over a big city one time in a splurge. Yeah, I hear ya. I was surprised at how similar the feel is. Your bicycle analogy made me laugh -- spot on. I used to love taking my macho friends up in my dad's plane. There's this moment after take-off where my Dad will comment on "how smooth the air is" ... it's either "perspective" or a pilot joke, I'm not sure, because said "smooth air" is about as bad as reasonable air-turbulence on a jet and the flight is usually marked occasionally by the kind of turbulence that would have the overhead bins tossing luggage onto passengers. I recall a humorous incident where my buddy Tim dropped an F-bomb over a hot mic on the headset when we got smacked sideways.

rubicon33 5y ago

There is a similar story in rally car safety. In the 80s and 90s going off the road at high speeds almost certainly meant death or serious injury. By comparison, there are some horrific crashes today that drivers are walking away from. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/YpNdoV6xv2s https://youtu.be/YpNdoV6xv2s

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

BashiBazouk 5y ago

I once witnessed an airplane crash that everyone survived. I was a preteen hanging around outside the Scotts Valley roller rink with a friend in the early eighties. The roller rink is next to the now defunct airfield. The airfield was lower than the rink by an embankment. We had recently been watching Jaws on Betamax and my most persistent memory is seeing only the tail crossing the field. It reminded me of a shark fin moving through the water, as the embankment was high enough that I could not see the body of the plane. Then bam, the plane hit the embankment right in front of me, caught air then crashed nose down. I think the plane was a Piper but my knowledge of small craft is limited. It was definitely a wing under. My friend ran to get his father and we all ran over to the wreck. My friend's father opened the doors and everyone but the pilot was able to get out by themselves. The pilot had hit his head on something and his face was covered in blood but alive. I found out from press reports later that was the only time I "met" Steve Wozniak. Edit: just looked it up. The plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this story. Well structured, great ending.
ZeljkoS 5y ago
https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple-history-steve-wozniak-in-plane-crash/ https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple-history-stev...

dehrmann 5y ago

> how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite The two "small" planes I've ridden in were a Cessna and an L-39. The Cessna felt like a toy, and the L-39 was a serious piece of hardware. Landings were also very different; the Cessna just got tossed around a lot more.