Harrison Ford

So I don't really remember that much about it.

I remember telling the tower when I declared the emergency that the instruction they gave me was not going to be followed.

Because I didn't have enough altitude to do what they suggested I do.

Anyway, that's the story in a nutshell.

I wasn't falling and crashing because I had my...

In my ear was the very clear voice of one of my aviation mentors, Bob Hoover, a famous pilot, who always, when talking about mechanical failures or other kinds of failures, the advice was to fly the airplane as far into the crash as possible.

You think about this thing when you're a pilot.

You think about the potential, the possibility of it happening.

And of course you train.

And so when it happened, it was not really a surprise.

And I thought I knew what I had to do to handle it.

So I just started doing the things that needed to be done.

No, I maneuvered the airplane using what gravity was going to give me and what the airplane could do powered only by gravity.

and to mitigate the consequence came at the ground.

So that's what I did.

I just picked a spot and was in the process of landing there.

I had run out of energy.

to maintain lift, so it wasn't a smooth landing.

It was more of a crash, but I'd not landed on anybody else, and I was in a clear space, you know.

So I'd done what I needed to do.