Late Night Press

It was August 1999, and I was sitting in the cockpit of a single-seat glider, a Czech-produced model called a Junior. The only sound was the murmur of a slight breeze blowing over the aircraft, and the aircraft was tipped slightly, the end of one long wing resting gently on the grass…

I answered the question “What is it like to be in a plane crash?” on Quora today. My answer is a slightly different perspective on what I’ve already written about as I tried to describe what it was like to go through the experience in a more factual and concise way than the story I’ve told here.

[With minor edits, this is an article I wrote for New Zealand’s Soaring NZ gliding magazine, published in the December 2010 / January 2011 issue. I’ve added a link to the GPS record of the flight in IGC format at the end of the article. You can read my first person…