A 4th of July Like None Other – A Bicentennial Flight

An aerial view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A good place to have a radio.

A Remembrance by Patrick O’Connor
(Part of a work in progress titled “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up; The Charmed Life of a Boomer”)

The year 1976 was an exciting time. The USA was celebrating birthday number 200 … quite an accomplishment!

Lots of people were commemorating this memorable occasion …. well, actually, almost everyone. We really had no plans.

A friend asked us if we’d like to go for a ride in his small plane and visit Smith Mountain Lake, which is  a beautiful place. We knew he was working on his pilot license, but he informed us he had been “all checked out” and was fully licensed. We decided to go … a joy ride of sorts ….”a three-hour tour.” Off we went, four of us, for a plane ride around the Blue Ridge mountains in southwest Virginia.

The ride was going along okay until the pilot commented he wasn’t quite sure where he was. The terrain all pretty much looked the same from the air. At this point in the flight, he confessed he was not fully licensed yet, as he had told us.

I got pretty anxious when he handed me a map and asked if I could figure out where we were. Of course, I had no idea. To make matters worse, something malfunctioned in the radio. So, there we were … about 5,000 feet up in a little four-seater plane with a broken radio and a lost pilot who had no idea what to do. Plus, we were flying around in the Blue Ridge Mountains with no place to land. Hmmm.

We flew around for another 10-15 minutes, taking some comfort from the idea that we had about one-half tank of fuel. However, we knew we had to get the plane down, find out where we were, and get back to home base. This was going to be difficult since we had no way of communicating with anyone. So, we flew around for a while until we spotted what looked like a runway. Maybe an abandoned airfield or something? At any rate, it looked like a place we could land so he started to descend to get a closer look. He checked it out and said it looked big enough to land the plane.  

As we descended and got closer to the landing area, we still didn’t know what surface we were approaching … we just needed to get on the ground. Then suddenly everything went silent….totally silent. All we could hear was the wind whispering as we headed downward. It turns out that if a plane descends too quickly, the carburetors freeze up, causing the engine to stall. The pilot can press “carb heat” to restart the engine, but our hero was too inexperienced to know this. In addition to being lost, we were now gliding toward our landing site. No turning back now; just falling. This is an experience when people look into each other’s eyes as if it were the last time. Sue and I held hands as we shared that look heading in for a landing. Pretty scary stuff.

The pilot managed to get the plane onto the surface, but it crashed just after hitting the pavement. The nose of the plane went down rapidly, and we skidded for a while at a 45-degree angle with flames shooting through the floor of the plane at my feet. It finally came to the proverbial screeching halt. We jumped out and ran a hundred feet or so and collapsed onto the pavement where we watched the plane burn. I think it was only a minute or two that the flames and smoke roared, consuming the entire plane. It seemed much longer. 

We stopped shaking after a few minutes and got to our feet. By this time, a Virginia state trooper arrived. Some people had seen the plane in trouble and called for assistance. It turned out our landing runway was actually a drag strip that was closed for the holiday. Lucky us. We did walk away from the crash, which was worth something, I guess. 

We found out we were about 60 miles off course near Independence, Virginia.  Guess we had to share some of the responsibility for the saga since we did agree to go along… just a joy ride to celebrate the bicentennial. If your time is up, exiting in Independence on the bicentennial is pretty novel. Luckily, a bicentennial only happens every 200 years.

Epilogue
It took some time to get on a plane again after that one! I had to travel as part of my job, so I just committed myself to accepting that flying would be tough, which it was. It took Sue much longer to get on a plane again. We still hold each other’s hand during take-off and landing.