A North Carolina pilot and his wife survived a nighttime crash after their single-engine plane lost power and came down in a tree, stopping just six feet above the ground.
Dustin Davis and his wife, Autumn, were flying with their two dogs, Sophie and Royce, to their beach house in Ocean Isle on Oct. 7, after attending church earlier that day. The couple was piloting a Piper PA-32 aircraft.
“It was like any other night,” Davis told local outlet WRAL. “It was a beautiful night, clear night. You know, there was no moon, so outside of that, it was a dark sky.”
At about 6,000 feet, the engine suddenly stopped producing power. “The engine just wasn’t producing power,” Davis said. The couple radioed air traffic control, but the plane could not reach the nearest airport in time.
With no roads or lights visible in the darkness, Davis turned the aircraft and prepared for a crash landing. Autumn Davis asked her husband what she could do to help.
“I said, ‘Babe, just pray, just pray.'”
Neither of them knew what was below them. “We didn’t know if it was going to be a field. We didn’t know if it’d be trees. We didn’t know if it’d be a couple houses with no lights on, a barn,” Davis said.
When trees appeared ahead, Davis pulled back on the controls. “When we made that turn and saw the trees, I pulled back,” he said. “I got us down to about 74 knots, which is as slow as I could get without going into a stall.”
The maneuver slowed the aircraft enough that its belly absorbed the impact, leaving the plane lodged in a tree just six feet off the ground.
“Seeing that we were only six feet off the ground, I could not tell you the joy and happiness,” Davis said. “We got our dogs and jumped out of that plane.”
Dustin Davis suffered a black eye after hitting his head on the dashboard, and Autumn Davis experienced neck and back soreness. Both dogs were unharmed.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.
Davis said the experience has changed his outlook. “I feel like I’m kind of in the bonus rounds at this point,” he said. “Oct. 7 kind of marked a time when I feel like I got a new start, and we want to take advantage of it.”
