The Crash of N953CD

On April 9, 2007 I managed to crash the first aircraft I owned over an isolated area of New Mexico. Thanks largely to the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) manufactured by Ballistic Recovery Systems, I walked away from the crash without so much as a scratch.

The official details of the crash are contained in the NTSB report, a link to which is contained below. If you are so inclined, you can read the report for all the details of the crash itself.

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=DEN07LA082&rpt=fa

What is not contained in the report, however, is my trip home from the middle of nowhere New Mexico (officially 16 miles north of Luna, NM). Surprisingly, my trip home was relatively quick and uneventful.

I crash landed near a ranch house. After collecting a few of my things including a hand held Garmin 396 GPS from the aircraft wreckage, I walked down the hill towards the ranch house. Unfortunately, nobody was home and the doors were locked. I decided to wander around a bit and try to pick up a cell phone signal. From the nearby road, I was able to get just one little bar of service. I called 911. I told the operator where I was thanks to my hand held GPS device giving me precise coordinates. After convincing the operator that I really was unharmed after an airplane crash, he let me know that the closest emergency response was nearly an hour to an hour and twenty minutes away from my location. I asked the operator to let my family know that I was ok and settled in for a bit of a wait.

I busied myself by carrying my baggage from the aircraft wreckage down to the road (roughly a ½ mile hike up and down the forested hillside). Once I had my stuff down, the weather moved it a bit more and it began to rain. I carried everything down to the porch of the ranch house for a little cover. Shortly thereafter, an Air Force C-130 emerged from the clouds and started flying a figure 8 pattern over the ELT (emergency locating transmitter) signal being emitted from my plane. It was quite an incredible site to see a huge C-130 lumbering out of the low cloud layer and flying over me and my aircraft.

As promised, the local police and highway patrol showed up about an hour and twenty minutes after my phone call to 911. After a short discussion and explanation of what happened to the local police, an Air Force helicopter began to circle overhead and landed shortly there after.

After a few questions from the Air Force recovery party, they loaded me and my stuff into the helicopter for a short 45 minute flight back to Albuquerque International Airport. The helicopter landed on the Air Force side of the airport and had a civilian security guard pick me up and take me back around to the commercial side of the airport. I managed to clean up in the restroom, change my cloths and re-pack my suit case so I could check one bag and carry the other on the commercial flight. I booked a one-way flight home on Frontier Airlines, passed through security and made several phone calls while I waited. I talked to my family for a while assuring them I really was perfectly alright. I spoke with some friends in Denver to arrange a ride home from the airport. Cirrus Design heard about my accident and called me to make sure everything was alright.

By 10:30 that night I was home, showered and comfortably in my bed. My return home was really quite amazing considering the potential gravity of the situation.