Pilot Dies, Passenger Lands Plane—with His Family on Board

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love hearing your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. The motion picture On a Wing and a Prayer follows passenger Doug White’s arrowing journey to safely land a plane and save his entire family from insurmountable danger after their pilot dies unexpectedly mid-flight. By the way, the role is beautifully played by Dennis Quaid. Here to share the story is the man who lived it, Doug White. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:51
Speaker 2: Nineteen eighty-nine, I was running a drug store in little town of Mangham, Louisiana (m A n G h A M). We had no doctors there, so we had to depend on people to come from larger cities like Monroe after they’ve seen the doctor and bring the prescriptions thirty miles back to our store. Well, my store was literally right the side a drug store that had been there for one hundred years, and it was called Mangham Drug. Been there Salon. Well, I wasn’t out of town, or I lived thirty miles away, and I was originally wasn’t from this area.

00:01:26
Speaker 3: And the lady that was running…

00:01:28
Speaker 2: The drug store next to me was born and raised here. Her daddy owned the cotton gin there. She graduated from high school there.

00:01:35
Speaker 3: So, to say the…

00:01:37
Speaker 2: least, she was killing me in business. We were just about to starve to death. So, rather than try to beat her in business, I just married her.

00:01:46
Speaker 3: We made one big drug…

00:01:47
Speaker 2: store. And two kids and three granddaughters later, here we are. So, fast-forward to two thousand and six. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and he had just come back from the Cooper Clinic in Dallas. And I said, ‘What’s the Cooper Clinic?’

00:02:05
Speaker 3: He said, ‘You know the guy that…’

00:02:07
Speaker 2: invented or started aerobics, Dr. Ken Cooper?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, he’s got a big clinic out there in Dallas. They don’t accept insurance. They don’t do any treating, but they it’s a diagnostic clinic. They just diagnose, and they’ve got this one test that I went through.’

00:02:25
Speaker 3: He said that we’ll give you a good…

00:02:27
Speaker 2: indication if you’ve got any blockages in your cardiac art reason. It’s non invasive like a heart caf is.

00:02:34
Speaker 3: I said, ‘That sounds interesting to me.’ I said, ‘I think…’

00:02:36
Speaker 2: I’ll look into that because I’ve got a lot of heart trouble in my family on both sides. So, I talked to my wife and I said, ‘You want to go to Dallas for the weekend?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ Well, we went out there on Friday, and I made the deployment, went through all the tests and everything. Of course, I’ve been riding a bicycle a pretty good bit, so I had some good cardio training under my belt, and we just all figured I was gonna ace all that. Well, the lady comes out on after the treadmill. She said, ‘Well, it was a positive test.’

00:03:08
Speaker 3: I said, ‘That’s good.’

00:03:10
Speaker 2: She said, ‘No, that’s not good. Positive is bad. It means you flunked it.’ I said, ‘Oh, I flunked.’

00:03:16
Speaker 3: It, ‘Yep, and…’

00:03:20
Speaker 2: I think you need to have a further exam. So, we did the test where they checked your calcium in your arter is the one my buddy was telling me about. And I flunked that one. And then they had me go do a heart sea tea and I flunked that.

00:03:34
Speaker 4: One.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: Guy said, ‘You need to find a cardiologist.’ I said, ‘Man.’ So, I came back. That’s made for a long weekend. I came back, and I said, ‘I filled a lot of prescriptions for cardiologists, but I’ve never been to one.’

00:03:47
Speaker 3: ‘Who am I gonna go see?’

00:03:48
Speaker 2: Well, this one guy’s name popped out that I filled a lot of prescriptions for in local areas.

00:03:54
Speaker 3: I went, made the pointing over them.

00:03:55
Speaker 2: He got me in two days, and he said, ‘You just bought yourself a cath.’

00:04:01
Speaker 3: I saw, ‘Okay.’ He goes in.

00:04:05
Speaker 2: I had an eighty percent blockage, a ninety percent blockage, and one hundred percent blockage. And one hundred percent, the Good Lord, and my body had come out above the blockage, come out of the artery on both sides, grown two new arteries down beside the blockage, and then tied back in below the blockage. So, to this day, I’ve got one hundred percent blockage in me, but it’s got two arteries going around it. But all that was done with no symptoms, riding a bicycle ten miles a day, no shortness of breath, no nothing. I was fifty-three years old. All right. So, go see my brother. I had one sibling, a brother named Jeff. He was two years younger. When he was about fifty-one, I went to see him, and I said, ‘Jeff, you need to go get a stress test done.’ I said, ‘I had two stints put in when I was fifty-three.’ And I said, ‘We had two fifty-three-year-old cousins had heart attacks on one on each side of the family.’

00:05:07
Speaker 3: ‘Thirty-nine-year-old uncle had triple.’

00:05:09
Speaker 2: bypass. His forty-five-year-old brother dropped dead of a heart attack, et cetera, et cetera.

00:05:14
Speaker 3: I said, ‘You need to go get a stress test.’

00:05:16
Speaker 2: ‘You’re fifty-one, and all these other things happened at fifty-three.’

00:05:20
Speaker 3: in our family.

00:05:21
Speaker 2: Well, IQ-wise, my brother was probably genius, and he worked with a bunch of doctors in an oncology clinic. He was a radiation health physicist. He’s the one that calibrated and set up treating my programs for the radiation machines and…

00:05:38
Speaker 3: the gamma knife radiation machines.

0005:40
Speaker 2: He would calibrate all that, and he worked with a bunch of doctors, and IQ-wise, he probably was smarter than they were, but sometimes he lacked in common sense.

00:05:49
Speaker 3: I said, ‘So you need to go get that check.’ He say, ‘They’re not gonna do anything.’

00:05:54
Speaker 2: Check your temperature, maybe get your blood or something. He rubbed his forehead, you know. And I said, ‘No, it’s more.’

00:05:59
Speaker 3: Plus, his wife was a nurse. Well, he never did go, and he dropped dead of a heart attack. And guess how old he was? Fifty-three.

00:06:11
Speaker 2: So, I get word on a Sunday or a Saturday afternoon…

00:06:16
Speaker 3: that he had died.

00:06:18
Speaker 2: My mother was there because she spent two or three months in the winter down in Naples, Florida, and his wife…

00:06:23
Speaker 3: was there. And so I had to hurry up.

00:06:26
Speaker 2: And I found a way to get to Naples and helped tend to that. So, Monroe, Louisiana was not a good connection that on that short of notice. So, I went to Jackson, Mississippi, because that’s probably two hours to the airport from me, and flew down there on Sunday. My family came down in the middle of the week.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Doug White tell his story. And by the way, there’s a movie based on his story. On a Wing and a Prayer, and Dennis Quaid. Please, Doug White. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, a remarkable and rich voice from a part of our country. Oh, there just aren’t enough stories about. More of Doug White’s story. When we continue here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and Doug White’s story. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:08:17
Speaker 2: So, we buried my brother on Good Friday, and I remember Friday afternoon being in his house, all the keen folks and all the friends stuff, family friends. But from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, about one thirty, I don’t remember anything. Don’t remember anything to this day. That was in two thousand and nine. Somebody said, ‘You remember going out to the Japanese restaurant that night on Saturday night?’

00:08:46
Speaker 3: ‘Don’t you?’

00:08:46
Speaker 2: I said, ‘No, I couldn’t tell you.’ Easter Sunday, they all went to Sunrise Church. I went to the regular time service.

00:08:53
Speaker 3: I don’t remember any of that.

00:08:55
Speaker 2: So, I knew that a King airplane from my home airport had been chartered to the final day of the Master’s Golf Tournament, to the Master’s Final Sunday in Augusta, Georgia. So, I made a call to my buddy up there, and I said, ‘Well, after you drop those people off in Georgia, can you swing down here to Marco Island, Florida, and pick me and my family up, flies back to Monroe, and then I’ll just pay you the difference in the gasoline between a straight shot back to Monroe and y’all looping down here?’ Because the charter people had already paid for the airplane and the and the pilot and all that. Said, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ So, they flew down there. Of course, we were gonna come back to Jackson first and drop me off, and then he would go ahead and bring the girls on back to Monroe.

00:09:48
Speaker 3: Joe K. Bucks (c A B Uk) was retired Fulbird colonel and Air Force was the pilot of the airplane. He flew down from Augusta, Georgia, and he landed. I got on the airplane, he was going because we didn’t have any return tickets from the time we went down to my brother’s funeral because we didn’t know what time would be coming.

00:10:08
Speaker 2: Home or when. I said, ‘You care if I sit up front?’ He said, ‘No, sit right up here. Here, here’s a…’

00:10:14
Speaker 3: headset, because I said, ‘I like looking out the window, and I like to…’

00:10:18
Speaker 2: listen to the radio communication chatter. I’d only been on that King Air one time in my life before, and that was a couple months earlier, and I’d asked the pilot, not Joe, but another fellow, ‘How do you talk on the radio?’ And he reached over and showed me which button to push on the yoke there at the steering wheel, if you will. So, I knew which button to push. So, I got on two months later, and Joe was such a pro that he had both sets of radios already tuned in and died to the next frequency that we were going to need to talk to.

00:10:54
Speaker 3: So, we take off.

00:10:55
Speaker 2: We head the south towards Key West. He makes a one to eighty, and we fly up through some clouds because we’re getting beat up pretty good and getting kicked around. He said, ‘Don’t remember.’ Joe said, ‘It’ll smooth out when we get up on top here.’ So, we popped out on top, and it did smooth that.

00:11:11
Speaker 4: Well.

00:11:11
Speaker 2: He’s about when he checks in with Miami Center at eighty-five hundred feet, and you can hear it on YouTube. You can hear him just run out of breath on the radio because he had his finger on the push-to-talk switch.

00:11:27
Speaker 3: And he dies right there.

00:11:28
Speaker 2: And we’re on a two thousand foot per minuted climb on autopilot, and I don’t have a clue. Every two and a half minutes, we’re another mile higher. So, I don’t know if we’re gonna run out of oxygen, if we’re gonna get to a certain heights and quit flying and just stall and come out of the sky, which we would have happened. I don’t know, but I do know where to push the talk button is because I’d ask the guy two months previous, and I remember, and I pushed the button and Joe would set the radio frequencies up where I didn’t have to try to find how to get to Miamis because I wouldn’t have a clue, and it would have been dead quiet up there. So, I pushed the button and told them what was going on, and we had an emergency, and I immediately moved to the head of the head of the line. When you’re an airplane and you declare an emergency, you moved to the head of the class quickly.

00:12:16
Speaker 5: ‘I got declared emergency pilot to see Simon, I need help up here. I mean, I need a can air of pilot to talk to.’

00:12:24
Speaker 3: So, they I started.

00:12:27
Speaker 2: The first fellow was not helping me too bad, too much, because I just wanted to stop the climb and went. It was supposed to stop at ten thousand feet and level out, but evidently there was a glitch or something because we blew right through ten thousand feet. So, here’s eleven thy, twelve thousand, fourteen thousand, little.

00:12:43
Speaker 5: ‘Pilot so once again says ten thousand. I’ve already busted ten thousand on a steady climbing. I need to stop the climb. I can say, ‘Went everybody up,’ and I say, ‘You got it? N thatth the whiskey I’m here, don’t. I would kind of finding a solution to that as stand by one.”

00:12:59
Speaker 2: So, they go get another controller in Miami named Lisa Grimm, who also has some piloting experience. They bring her down, and they set her down beside the first guy I was talking to, and he’s working all these airliners full of people because it’s Easter Sunday, it’s International Airport in Miami, and people coming in and flying out to visit family and going home and all that.

00:13:23
Speaker 3: It was busy.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: So, while he’s working five or six, seven aircraft full of hundreds of people, she’ll give him a hand signal.

00:13:30
Speaker 3: So, I gotta work this guy.

00:13:31
Speaker 2: So, she’d take over and say something to me for a couple of seconds, then hand it back to him. So, she convinced me to disconnect the autopilot.

00:13:39
Speaker 3: Not if I does a whiskey, just need to be autopilot.

00:13:42
Speaker 4: We’re going to have you. We’re gonna have you hand fly the plane.

00:13:46
Speaker 2: So, she showed me where it was at, and I flipped the switch to disconnect it.

00:13:51
Speaker 5: ‘I disengaged it. I’m flying the airplane in my hand. You find me along with the way you can laws.’

00:14:01
Speaker 2: Well, I know all this now, I didn’t know it then, but the airplane was trimmed to climb at two thousand foot per minute, so the rudders and alley runs and everything were set to climb.

00:14:13
Speaker 3: The nose was up. Well, just because I turned off.

00:14:15
Speaker 2: The autopilot, none of that changes. So, as soon as I clicked that autopilot off, that nose that King Air was sticking straight up in the air. And that was the heaviest thing I’d ever grabbed a hold of my life. I thought I’d grabbed a hold of a thousand pound gorilla. So, I tried to push the yoke forward as hard as I could with my right hand. And I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a little switch by my thumb. My left thumb is an electric trim switch. I could have just pushed it and gave myself some immediate, immediate release, but I didn’t know anything about that. But I knew there was a trim wheel way over on the other side of the airplane, so I reached over there with my left hand. While I was with my right hand, I was shoving to go forward as hard as I could to keep the nose from going straight up.

00:15:04
Speaker 3: And stalling an airplane.

00:15:06
Speaker 2: And I reached between the pilot’s dead leg and the panel over there, and I got one finger on the trim control wheel, and I was able to give myself a little bit of relief where I could handle the airplane. So, they take me over out over the golf of Mexico. I guess maybe not gonna make as big of an explosion or something. So, I’m going out over the Golf of Mexico heading west. I’ve got a baby blue sky going into baby blue water, so I have no visual reference. I mean, it’s instruments like conditions at two o’clock in the afternoon, and he’s wanting me to make a one to eighty and turn back towards land. I know that, but I’m afraid to turn the airplane. I’m afraid of upset it and flip it upside down. So, what should have been a maybe a one minute turn probably took me ten or twelve minutes because I was all tensed up.

00:15:58
Speaker 4: ‘You show me in a turn. I’m up moving very good here, I know.’

00:16:02
Speaker 6: ‘Still, let’s take a southwest down and no turn yet. The opportude still look good, but you’re still southwest down pill turn right to left.’

00:16:10
Speaker 4: ‘Okay, hold on.’

00:16:13
Speaker 2: So, I’m out over the Golf of Mexico, and I said, ‘Well, if I turn this auto pilot back on, well that helped me fly.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you can. You can turn that back on if you want to.’ So, I reached down there on the same switch, and I flipped it on. Well, what I didn’t know was when Joe had got ready to take off, he had set the autopilot to fly due north out of South Florida, do north towards the Panhandle of Florida. That hadn’t changed either, just because I turned it off. So, I’m heading due west out over the Gulf. When I turned the auto pilot back on, that thing yanks around to the right and yaws to the right real hard, wanting to fly north like it was set to. And that kind of scared me. So, I turned it back off real quick, and…

00:16:55
Speaker 3: I said, ‘No, I can’t do that, messes up my heading.’

00:16:58
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Doug White tell one heck of a story. The movie is On a Wing and a Prayer.

00:17:04
Speaker 3: ‘I see it.’

00:17:05
Speaker 1: By all means, it’s the story of Doug White. And by the way, Dennis Quaid does a heck of a job playing Doug White. But this is Doug White, and you’re hearing real life audio from the tower, and my goodness, he sounds calm, and I guess in those circumstances that’s all you’ve got. But how he handled himself in the cockpit, it’s just remarkable listening to it. ‘My pilot is deceased, and I need a King Air pilot to talk to.’ He asks or commands. ‘I need to stop the climb,’ he says. A bit later, when we come back, more of Doug White. What happens next here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and Doug White’s story. Let’s pick up where we last left off.