How would you handle a life-or-death emergency? Would you remain calm, collected and save the day? Or would you panic and need rescuing? Maybe a bit of both? For one Florida man, an in-flight emergency left him facing a crash that would have left him, another passenger and the pilot dead.
Last year, Darren Harrison was on a short flight from the Bahamas to Fort Pierce, Fla., when his pilot, Ken Allen, 65, suddenly passed out. What had been an uneventful flight was now careening quickly toward tragedy. Darren had zero flying experience, but knew he had to act fast to save them all.
Emergency responders rush to get the unconscious pilot off the plane. Photo from YouTube
The plane was 12,000 feet in the air and headed down in a nose dive. Ken had slumped backwards, so Darren reached around him and grabbed the controls. “By the time I had moved forward to the front of the airplane, I realized that we had now gone into a dive at a very fast rate,” he said.
And at that point, I knew if I didn’t react, that we would die.”
So, Darren took the controls and slowly began to “pull back on the stick and turn.” When he was asked by reporters how he knew what to do, Darren said it was simple. “Just common sense, I guess, being on airplanes, because I knew if I went up and yanked that the airplane would stall,” he said. “I also knew at the rate we were going we were probably going way too fast and it would rip the wings off the airplane.”
But despite his calm demeanor, Darren said that those moments before he managed to contact ground control was “the scariest part of the whole story.” The other passenger, a friend of the pilot’s, gave Darren his headset so he could get help.
“I’ve got a serious situation here,” he told ground control. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.” Asked by the dispatcher of the plane’s position, he quickly told them, “I have no idea. I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
Ken Allen and Darren Harrison. Photo by Nathan Congleton
The dispatcher walked Darren through how to navigate and fly the plane. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), controller Christopher “Chip” Flores and operational supervisor Justin Boyle “instructed (Darren) to fly straight ahead and to start a gradual descent allowing time for air traffic control to locate the aircraft.”
After ground control employees located the Cessna aircraft and began tracking it, a flight instructor helped guide Darren to the Palm Beach Airport. Darren said he “slowly feathered” the brakes once he brought the plane in for a safe landing.
“Surprisingly I felt so comfortable with it, I radioed to the guy, I said ‘Hey I’m feeling pretty confident in the brakes and everything, do you guys want me to turn off the runway so I can clear this thing out,'” he said. Emergency responders took Ken to Palm Beach Medical Center, where he had emergency heart surgery to repair a tear in his aorta. After 17 months of recovery, Ken has now been cleared to fly solo.
Ken and Darren were able to see each other again, this past month, on the Today show. After the two men hugged, Ken said that the pair were “connected for life.” “Occasionally I’ll have flashbacks about it, but just most importantly, how everything worked out and just it all came together,” Darren said.
It was just a miracle in itself.”
His only explanation, he said, for how he was able to land the plane was simple. “The hand of God was on that plane,” Darren said. “That’s the only thing I can attribute it to, there’s no other explanation for it.” Watch the two men’s tearful reunion, below.
