Recipes for Life by Linda Evans

Author:Linda Evans [Evans, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593156909
Publisher: Vanguard Press
Published: 2012-08-20T05:49:08+00:00

My “fly me to the moon” man in the cockpit.

One afternoon, a few months after he’d gotten his license, George needed to fly to Northern California for a business meeting and wanted me to come along. As we were preparing to take off, it was clear that weather conditions weren’t ideal. The rain had stopped for the moment, but the winds were still strong. I felt apprehensive for an instant, but then it passed because I had such confidence in George’s ability and he didn’t seem concerned. Well, that is until we were nearing the airport and he told me that he’d heard there was a very steep mountain at one end and a very short runway with a forest on one side. Aside from how difficult the mountain made the approach, if there was wind, it had to be coming from a certain direction for a “successful landing.”

In other words, this was one very tricky airport to maneuver, even when the weather was good. It looked like we were in luck. The tower gave George the okay to land, which meant the windsock was in our favor. But George wasn’t happy with his first approach and decided to abort rather than take any chances. So we went back up.

We circled several more times waiting for the tower to tell us the wind was right again. I was starting to get a little nervous. But finally we got the okay to come in.

Just as we were touching down, the wind suddenly shifted, but it was too late to abort. We were already barreling down the runway with the wind pushing us forward like a rocket. Up ahead I could see a chain-link fence with traffic speeding along on the other side of it.

Already knowing the answer, but hoping anyway, I looked over at George and, with surprising calm, asked, “That’s the end of the runway, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he answered with equal calm.

“We’re going to crash aren’t we?”

“Looks like it.” George replied.

An instant later, his survival instinct kicked in and he turned the plane so sharply to the right that it pulled us off the runway and onto the rain-soaked grass. We avoided crashing into the fence and speeding cars, but the second the tires hit the grass, the plane flipped over and came to a jarring stop.

Hanging upside down from the ceiling in my safety harness, I felt incredibly relieved. I looked over at George hanging next to me and almost laughed because we looked like two bats. But then George said we had to get out of the plane immediately because it might explode.

Without another word, we both unbuckled our belts as fast as we could and, at the exact same time, landed on our heads. The crash didn’t hurt us, but we nearly killed ourselves trying to get out. Rubbing our heads and moaning, we crawled out of the plane together.

Already we could hear lots of emergency vehicles coming. I suddenly flashed on all the warning I got

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