Dustin Davis told his wife to pray as their single-engine plane lost power over eastern North Carolina.
The pilot, his wife Autumn, and their two dogs Sophie and Royce had taken off after church on Oct. 7 for what should have been a routine hop to their beach house in Ocean Isle. Dustin Davis, the pilot, later described the conditions to WRAL as ideal flying weather. “It was like any other night,” he said. “It was a beautiful night, clear night. You know, there was no moon, so outside of that, it was a dark sky.”
That darkness would become critical when the Piper PA-32 suffered engine failure at 6,000 feet. “The engine just wasn’t producing power,” Davis said. The couple worked through emergency procedures and contacted air traffic control, but the aircraft could not reach the nearest airport.
With no roads visible below and nowhere else to go, Autumn Davis asked what she could do to help. Her husband had one instruction. “I said, ‘Babe, just pray, just pray.'”
The pair turned left into the black sky with no certainty about what lay beneath them. “We didn’t know if it was going to be a field. We didn’t know if it’d be trees. We didn’t know if it’d be a couple houses with no lights on, a barn,” Davis said.
Spotting trees ahead, Davis executed a nose-up maneuver to bleed speed. “When we made that turn and saw the trees, I pulled back,” he said. “I got us down to about 74 knots, which is as slow as I could get without going into a stall.”
The belly of the aircraft absorbed the impact, and the plane came to rest suspended in a tree just six feet above ground. “Seeing that we were only six feet off the ground, I could not tell you the joy and happiness,” Davis said.
The couple and their dogs exited quickly. “We got our dogs and jumped out of that plane,” he said.
The injuries were remarkably minor given the circumstances. Dustin Davis sustained a black eye from hitting the dashboard. Autumn Davis experienced soreness in her neck and back. Sophie and Royce, the couple’s dogs, escaped without any injuries at all.
Davis has embraced a changed perspective since the crash. “I feel like I’m kind of in the bonus rounds at this point,” he said. “Oct. 7 kind of marked a time when I feel like I got a new start, and we want to take advantage of it.”
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the engine failure that forced the nighttime emergency landing.