A student pilot has recounted the terrifying moments before his light plane “fell from the sky” during his second ever flying lesson.
Jake Elven had been practising taking off and landing at The Oaks Airfield west of Sydney on Thursday when the engine failed while he and his instructor were 1500 feet in the air.
“That eerie silence of it floating down to those trees is something I won’t forget, obviously I knew that we weren’t going to make the runway,” he told 10 News.
The pair tried to open the plane’s flaps at the last minute to give them a bit more airtime but they were caught in a side draft which made their landing even more complicated.
“It ended up stalling the plane and putting it on its side and it just fell out of the sky,” he said.
“Last thing I remember was hitting the first big tree, the back of the plane smashing that and then I remember the back of the plane coming up and over and sunlight coming from all the wrong angles.
“We cleared about 100m of trees out of the way before we hit the last big one that stopped us.”
He also revealed what was going through his head as he plane went down.
“I’m just thinking, Aircraft Investigations, I’m going to be next up,” he said.
When Mr Elven regained consciousness about 10 minutes after the crash, he and his instructor were trapped in the flipped plane.
His instructor was still knocked out with some “pretty bad lacerations”, so Mr Elven “helped him out the best we could”, and dragged him to his wife’s car before she took him to hospital.
He then made the “insane” decision to drive himself from Camden to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown.
“So I had heaps of adrenaline left so I thought I’d take an hour and a half drive up to this hospital here and spent 15 minutes trying to find parking and then waddled on into emergency barefoot, bark hanging off me, pissing blood and people thinking I’m insane trying to tell them I crashed a plane,” he said.
He’s also planning on taking to the skies again despite the crash.
“You can’t let that stop you, it didn’t kill me.”