Published: October 14, 2009 05:56 pm      

Beating incredible odds: Plane crashes don’t always end in tragedy

We hear lots of calls on police scanners each week, and many times they don’t result in stories. Fire departments and rescue squads hurry with sirens howling and lights flashing to a reported fire only to find that somebody’s dinner burned on the stove. Some days I know it’s time for breakfast because a fire department’s been dispatched.

“Somebody’s burned their toast,” I think to myself.

I know this situation doesn’t make sense sometimes. Why respond with such force when you don’t know what the problem is going to be? Well, that’s the whole point. First responders don’t know what they’re going to face, so they bring everything. Sometimes a seemingly minor incident turns out to be a dire emergency, and there are cases when what should have been a fatal incident turn into an incredible escape.

Journalists see tragedies all the time, but for every tragedy there is a narrow scrape that defies explanation. A recent air crash covered by fellow reporter Bill Archer brought to mind at least a couple of incidents I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

I was surprised Monday morning when I read Bill’s account of a Kentucky family that actually survived a plane crash in Russell County. Coming down in our mountainous, forest terrain usually doesn’t equal a good chance for survival. By their very nature, aircraft don’t survive impacts very well. They have to be light in order to fly, and while they are strong, they are not crash resistant.

Yet it happened last Saturday night. A Piper Cub flying near Laurel Bed Lake encountered fog, clipped some treetops and snagged some vines. The plane was brought to the ground, yet all three people aboard it survived.

I remember a similar incident more than 10 years ago when a privately owned plane crashed near the Mercer County Airport. One evening I was at home listening to a scanner when Mercer 911 was alerted about a crash near the airport. I wasn’t on duty, but I called to see if the newsroom needed any help. Our people were already heading for the scene.

I didn’t envy them; well, not too much. The night was rainy and messy, and I had covered a plane crash about three weeks earlier near the airport. Getting to the crash site involved packing myself and several fellow news seekers like a load of luggage into the back of a rescue squad’s SUV and going up a slick dirt path. That day’s forecast was snow and freezing wind, and we had plenty of both on the mountain side. That crash ended in tragedy, so I fully expected to hear an announcement that the wreckage of this latest downed plane had been found.

An announcement came a lot sooner than I expected. The rescuers didn’t have to look for the plane because the pilot could lead them to it. He had just walked out of the woods.

That plane had lost both wings as it plowed through the trees, but the pilot actually emerged without a scratch. Despite the bad odds, he had survived.

These incidents happen on the highways, too. Probably the most amazing example I’ve seen firsthand was a crash on Lorton Lick Road between Bluewell and Montcalm. When I reached the scene and found a place to park, my first thought was “fatality.” An open convertible and an SUV had collided with such force that both of them were mangled wrecks.

However, I didn’t see anybody in either vehicle. I asked a deputy what had happened to the occupants and he pointed them out. They were standing there, stunned, looking at the wreckage. The guys in the convertible had been catapulted out and dropped in a front yard. They were battered and bruised, but it looked like they had been in a fight, not a crash.

There was even a time when several vehicles crashed and caught fire at the intersection of Locust Street and Route 460 near Princeton. I arrived expecting to hear about fatalities — each vehicle was a blackened, gutted hulk — but everybody had survived unharmed. If I remember correctly, each driver was alone and, without any passengers to worry about, they were able to bail out fast.

What are the odds of that?

I could go on. There was that car on Route 19 that went airborne and plowed into a living room just after it was vacated. And then there was the incident when a trailer broke loose from the car hauling it, only to coast down hill and come to a gentle stop against a guardrail.

In each of the above cases, a change in circumstance and timing would have turned a near miss into a tragedy.

This is why fire departments and rescue squads rush all the personnel and equipment they can to an emergency. You just don’t know the exact situation until you get there. A crash might have inflicted nothing more than a bad mood and a chipped fingernail, or it might have put a person on the verge of death. Nobody knows what’s going on until the first responders arrive on the scene.

Greg Jordan is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph