September 26, 2009 – A Day that Changed my Life

Plane crash under investigation
Posted: Sep 28, 2009 4:51 AM CDT
Caledonia, MN (WXOW) - The Houston County sheriff's department is investigation an accident involving an ultra-light aircraft at the Caledonia airport. The accident happened Saturday afternoon. Authorities say the pilot was trapped in the plane and sustained injures. The pilots name is being with held pending an investigation by the F-A-A.

Saturday, September 26th, seemed to work out as a good day to go taxi the JetWIng again. I called Steve and his schedule was clear, so I picked him up and we headed out to the Caledonia airport.
The previous week, I had made contact with a machine shop and had a new kingpin made according to my specifications. I was anxious to see if this pin would work. I had used the attachment hole in the king post as the guide, but as we assembled the wing at the airport, the pin turned out to be too thick to attach the wing. We went back to using the safety tie from the trailer to attach the wing.
I wanted to practice taxiing the JetWing on the hard surfaced runway. We were able to get the engine to start consistently. It ran very smooth and I was encouraged by that. I started taxiing with the wing in a negative angle-of-attack position. I was able to taxi at a relatively high speed under control, maybe up to 30-35 MPH according to the Hall's airspeed indicator. I don’t know how many times I taxied up and down the runway.
There was a guy at the airport practicing T&G landings from the right seat in a C-150. Before he took to the airplane, he stopped and talked with us for awhile. After talking with him, he explained that he had gotten his CFI recently and wanted to practice by himself, so we agreed to watch for each other and I would vacate the runway when he was setting up to land. There wasn’t any real conflict. I just taxied up and down, would stop and rest and talk with Steve between runs.
The last run was memorable. It was getting late and darkness was coming soon, but I was invigorated and decided to taxi one more run, and taxied out heading eastbound onto the runway. I got the JetWing up to a high speed, keeping the controls at neutral or negative angle of attack. But suddenly and with a “whoosh” of wind gust, the Jetwing smoothly took off and started to climb unexpectedly. It got to 30-40 feet of altitude, and since I had not anticipated leaving the ground at all, I had not anticipated what to do in this circumstance. I instinctively backed off the throttle, exactly the wrong reaction. After thinking about this after the fact, I realize that I should have given it full power to keep from an immediate stall, which is exactly what the JetWing did. After rising above ground effect it stalled and it flipped over on its right side. I saw the runway come up at me with dizzying speed. With a sickening crashing sound, I smashed onto the hard surface on my right side, the JetWing on top of me. My first thought was that I had suffered a spinal cord injury, but after flexing my fingers I saw things were moving. However, I saw the my right wrist was twisted grotesquely, and my right ankle was in great pain and contorted in an unnatural position.
Although I did not lose consciousness, things did seem to become a little distorted as I probably entered shock. My ankle was twisted around in a strange position, and I pulled it around so it looked a little like an ankle rather than a alien appendage. It was hard to breathe; the tubing of the JetWing was pressing against my chest and cutting off my airways. Steve abndthe otherpilot came running down to where I was, about half-way down the runway. They saw what was happening and held the JetWing up so I was able to breathe. Afterwards, Steve said they had called 911 and told me that the paramedics were on the way. It took them about 20 minutes to arrive, although I wasn’t keeping track of the time.
When they arrived they started to process of extricating me from the wreckage. They used the jaw-of-life (apparently) and cut much of the tubing to free me. Afterwards when I looked at the remains, I saw that they were especially ambitious and cut almost everything. I was loaded into an ambulance and carted to Gundersen Lutheran Hospital. There they started immediately to repair the damage. They immediately sent me to surgery to explore where things were or weren’t, and I lost track of the time. Afterwards they reported that the right ankle was very seriously broken and that saving it was not assured. The right wrist was broken in three places, but none of the breaks looked particularly severe, certainly not as severe as the ankle.
After three more surgeries to the right ankle and one for the wrist and three weeks in the hospital, I was able to go home, only to hear that our house had just sold and we had to move in 10 days. It was good news, but I felt bad because being wheel-chair bound, and a wrist that was in a cast and was not to be used, I couldn’t help with packing for the move at all. The furthersest thing from my mind was the JetWing.