Tag: Dave Stith

Emergency Landing!

Soon after Brother Dave took off from Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte it was obvious even to me that something was wrong — we had stopped gaining speed and altitude.

Imagine yourself in a car, going 45 miles an hour on an interstate access ramp. You try to accelerate to 65 mph so you can merge into traffic, but your car won’t go any faster.  You’re stuck at 45. That’s was our problem – the plane had enough speed to take off but it wouldn’t accelerate.

 

Mark, L, and Bo, boarding the plane.
Mark, L, and Bo, boarding the plane.

Dave was carrying valuable cargo, my sons, Bo and Mark.  The four of us were on our way to Atlanta. Dave was treating us to an afternoon at the zoo at Grant Park and an evening of baseball, an Atlanta Braves game.

He opened his mike, radioed the tower, and declared an emergency. And then he turned the single engine plane around and headed back toward Douglas.

braveDeclaring an emergency is a drastic measure, something no pilot wants to do. It puts all of the airport’s assets at the pilot’s disposal – to start with he get his choice of runways and he goes to the head of the line of planes waiting to land. But when he gets down there will be questions — and it better have been an emergency.

At the plane approached the end of the runway Dave had chosen he tried to reduce power. But he couldn’t. It was like the throttle was stuck, he couldn’t make the plane go faster, and he couldn’t slow it down, either.

That’s when he switched off the engine, pressed the button of his mike, and began talking, fast, describing what he thought was wrong with the plane. I knew what he was doing, and it finally dawned on me that we might be in trouble.  Every word he spoke was being recorded and he was leaving a record for the crash investigators.

Only we didn’t crash. We glided, silently, landed softly on the runway and coasted to a stop.

And then we went home?

Oh, no, no, no. Dave rented another plane and flew us to Atlanta. We had a wonderful time.

Coming Friday: The Hike Of A Lifetime Lottery

Growing up Country

Pat, Too

Pat Stith
Pat Stith

After my mother died her only sibling, a brother, Dan Cameron, wanted to take me to raise, take me back to San Francisco where my mother’s family lived. I was the youngest of seven children and he said I was too young to take of myself.

That idea was DOA.

“All of the Stiths can take care of themselves,” my oldest brother, John, said. “And that includes Pat.”

I was five years old.

&^*%$#$#\

I admire men [women, too] who do not cuss. I wished I didn’t. And I don’t, in church. Or around women and children.

My oldest sister, Marge, who came home from college to help hold things together when my mother died, was unable to break me of that bad habit, although it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Frustrated, she said she asked me, “Pat, when are you going stop cussing.” And she said I answered, “When I get to heaven, I guess.”

 

Don’t Look Down

We were playing, throwing rocks at each other.

I was on the second floor of storage building on our farm, near Gadsden, AL, and I peeked out at the wrong time. The rock Brother Dave threw hit me just above my right eyebrow. The scar is still visible.

I was bleeding, bad, and wailing too, of course.

Dave was not reassuring. He took a look and told me, “Don’t look down, Pat, or your eyeball will fall out.”

 

Like Nothing I Ever Saw.  Or Heard.

I was boy, walking home after picking cotton on a neighboring farm, when I heard it, a steady clanking noise, like rocks in a tumbler.

And then I saw it, a cloud of dust moving down the dirt and gravel road toward me. I got out of the way and let it by, a car running on four rims.

Coming Monday: Did You Say IF?