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A pilot and his wife are lucky to be alive after reportedly surviving a harrowing nighttime crash in eastern North Carolina, when their single-engine plane suffered engine failure — and landed in a tree.
Dustin Davis and his wife, Autumn, went to church on Oct. 7 before hopping into their single-engine plane with their two dogs, Sophie and Royce, for a flight out to their beach house in Ocean Isle.
“It was like any other night,” Davis told local outlet WRAL.
“It was a beautiful night, clear night. You know, there was no moon, so outside of that, it was a dark sky.”
Suddenly, their Piper PA-32 aircraft suffered terrifying engine failure 6,000 feet in the sky.
“The engine just wasn’t producing power,” Dustin Davis said.
Desperate, the couple tried everything in the book and radioed air traffic control for help — but the plane couldn’t make it to the nearest airport.
With pitch-black darkness limiting visibility and no roads in sight, a crash landing was inevitable.
Autumn Davis asked what she could do — and her husband gave her the only option left: “I said, ‘Babe, just pray, just pray.'”
The couple had no idea where they would end up but turned left into the dark skies.
“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,” he said.
They saw trees directly ahead.
“When we made that turn and saw the trees, I pulled back,” Dustin Davis said.
“I got us down to about 74 knots, which is as slow as I could get without going into a stall.”
That nose-up maneuver softened the impact as the belly took the brunt of the crash, leaving the plane suspended in a tree just six feet above the ground.
“Seeing that we were only six feet off the ground, I could not tell you the joy and happiness,” he said.
“We got our dogs and jumped out of that plane.”
Miraculously, the couple suffered only minor injuries: Dustin Davis walked away with a black eye after slamming his head against the dashboard, while Autumn Davis suffered neck and back soreness.
Their two dogs emerged completely unscathed.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are currently investigating the crash.
Dustin Davis says the near-death experience gave him a brand-new lease on life.
“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.”