Ever have seatbelts save your life?

[Silveredwings]

I have; once in a car, once in a small airplane.

While driving a car, someone once hit me in the right arm with the bumper of his car. He ran a red light and hit my car in the right rear quarter (moving in the direction of my steering wheel) and proceeded driving through my car until he had accordianed my right door into the glovebox and his bumper actually hit me in the right arm. If the seatbelt (only a lap belt in those days) had not held me in the driver seat, the force of the collision would have knocked me into the passenger seat. Then I would have been shoved into the glove box with the right door being shoved in after me. It would not have been survivable. Yet I walked away.

Then on Memorial day around 1990, I saw a friend's plane flying overhead. I was near the airport so I drove over there. When I got there, he was back on the ground refueling the plane. He offered me a ride and I accepted. After we were about 150' off the ground, the engine died. This, by the way, is just about the worst time to lose an engine. We had dense forest directly ahead in the glide path. Unless he could squeeze it through a narrow gap we were going to head straight into the forest, shear off the wings, become a ballistic projectile, and probably wrap the plane around a tree. He opted for the gap. The next hazard was the pond/swamp below. If he could glide far enough, he might make it to a clearing and do a soft-field landing on a small grassy field. The problem with having a sudden need to maximize your glide when you're dead-stick (power-off) and short-final (very close to landing) is the temptation to pull back on the stick. This usually causes you to drop more quickly and therefore shortens your glide. Well, that's what happened and we landed in the swamp. The plane held together well and the wide 4-point seatbelts provided sufficient support to save our lives. All we had to do after that was swim out of the airframe and get to dry land. Easy. The rest was up to the NTSB.

Not being a pilot, I didn't know those technical details at the time. I figured most of this much later; you see when I got home, I called around and arranged a flight instructer and got into lessons of my own. I soloed a week later, and went on to do an instrument rating and commercial training. But that's another story.