03/25/2007

Associated Press

Thirty-five minutes after takeoff, Justin Hall felt the engine of his Piper Cherokee groan and lose power.

Hall, 21, and longtime flying buddy Josh Stohr, 24, raced through a checklist. Apply carburetor heat to the engine. Check the fuel mixture. Cross-check the instrument panel and keep an eye on altitude and flight speed.

Nothing happened and the Cherokee started falling.

"At that point, you realize that there's not enough time to panic," Hall said. "It's time to find a place to land."

The two licensed pilots had flown together more than a hundred times out of the Eugene area.

The March 5 flight over the Cascades promised to be picturesque, with a warm sun - "T-shirt weather," Stohr said later.

But it quickly turned into a harrowing tale of survival, Hall breaking his back, Stohr severely injuring his leg and losing his front teeth, and both men spending a night in the snow of the Deschutes National Forest.

"You don't realize the preciousness of life until you've been in a situation like this," Stohr said.

"We fly together all the time. One day, we take my plane. The next time we take his. This was routine. Until it wasn't."

Federal Aviation Administration statistics show when small planes go down, the chances of surviving are pretty high.

"There's this general misperception that these little planes just fall out of the sky if anything goes wrong and you're dead," said Chris Dancy, a spokesman for the Maryland-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. "The chances, though, are that six out of seven times, you might not walk away, but you'll survive."

Luck helped Hall and Stohr.

As the plane dropped, they braced for impact. Trees scraped against the bottom of the plane until it dipped further. Before he was knocked out, Hall saw a tree rip off part of a wing.

Stohr said the plane began to "pinball" and spin. It hit a patch of trees, flipped over and dropped 60 feet into deep snow. The two were hanging upside down, still strapped into their seats as snow poured into the crumpled plane. Fearing that it might explode, Stohr shouted at Hall to wake up and dragged him out of the wreckage.

They returned to the plane and tripped the emergency locator transmitter. As Stohr broadcast a distress call, he felt something burning his neck and arms - battery acid.

He ended the distress call and tended to Hall, who struggled to move because of his spinal injury. They took off their wet clothes and climbed into the tail section. To stave off dehydration, they wrung the water from their socks and drank it.

"We didn't have much daylight left, and it was getting cold really quickly," Stohr recalled.

They stripped the upholstery from the seats and wrapped themselves in it for warmth. The temperature dropped to about 20 degrees, they figured. They talked about how their lives might end.

But a passing jet picked up their distress call and notified authorities. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite collected signals from the plane's beacon. A ground and air search was launched immediately.

Hours later, they heard an Oregon National Guard helicopter. Stohr signaled with a flashlight. The helicopter dropped an emergency pack with water, blankets and other supplies.

The pack landed about 200 feet down a steep slope from the crash. Pushed by adrenaline, Hall set out after it. Most of the water containers had burst, but some hadn't and the blankets were dry. He returned to the plane. Help came the next morning when rescuers arrived on snowshoes.

"That was the greatest thing you could ever hear," Stohr said. "Earlier, things were pretty scary. We were talking the worst-case scenario and figured we didn't have much time left. Maybe two nights we could've survived."

Besides the battery acid burns, Stohr broke a wrist, dislocated a knee and cut his face and arms. Hall broke a vertebrae, his feet are still numb and he had several cuts and some acid burns.

Searchers from Klamath and Deschutes counties deserve "all the credit in the world," Stohr said. "They were amazing. Everything that could go right happened for us. We had a flashlight. They started looking for us right away. And the radio signal worked. They kept going until they found us."

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Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com