AP Photo

It was a beautiful day. Unlimited visibility. I was on the final approach to the Compton Airport when I lost an engine. When you're flying a twin-engine plane, you've got a power plant on each wing. When one fails, the plane's going to favor the other wing -- the plane started to yaw toward the good engine. It feels like you're being pulled to one side. So the first thing you do is bring up power on the good engine and stabilize the plane.

I wasn't worried at this point, because I'm trained to fly this plane on one engine. I've been flying for forty-seven years. I went through the normal procedure at that altitude, which was about seven hundred feet. I retracted the landing gear. But bear in mind when you lose an engine and you're at a low altitude, the plane's automatically going to lose altitude. At this point I'm too low and too slow, but I'm thinking, Don't give up the airplane. Don't panic. Put it down as safe as you can and walk away. Minimize the damage on the ground. Save my life and my passengers.

The world didn't pass before my eyes. I didn't think of being afraid. But we're at the point where the plane was going so low and so slow that we had to give it up. I mean, the plane was going to crash. I knew that. I did what I had to do to minimize the forward motion. I wanted to pick the nose up so the plane would fall on the tail and minimize the crash damage.

Unfortunately, the houses were there. There's no way I could maneuver the plane away from that. By the time it came in touch with the ground, we were probably doing twenty miles an hour. When the plane rolled over, it went nose down through the top of the house and into that woman's kitchen. I didn't see anything -- when it started to go down, I had no more control over it, so I covered my head.

–As told to Nicole Tourtelot

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