welcome to new beginnings with karen delk where we celebrate the courage creativity and wisdom of people creating change i am so pleased to have as my guest robin holleran author of bracing for impact and it talks about true tales of air disasters and people who survived them we are really in for an informative session and an interesting session she is the first person i know that has been in a plane crash and survived and i'm just anxious to get started to learn more about this whole thing and what interested you to write the book so welcome robin thank you so you tell us like where were you headed and how long ago this happened and what happened well it was during the holiday break and i took my three kids down to the atlanta area where my sister lived for just for a visit this was back in two thousand and five so they were mostly pre teens one i think was an early teen and after we got there as you can imagine they were a little bit antsy after all that time in the car so my brother in law an owl brought us all down to a hangar that was nearby to see his four cessna and we put the kids pulled the plane out of the hangar and they climbed in and he took them for like twenty minutes spin around the area and then i've always enjoyed flying so when he came back down i got in and fortunately my kids opted to hang out with their older cousin who was in college at that time and did not come back up with me because we were not more than five minutes when all this on there was a clunk and we were at about two thousand feet in the propeller froze in front of us and as you can imagine you know it's a four seater so i was in the copilot seat and i don't know if you've ever been in a small plane i have been ok so the propeller is pretty much right there so when it freezes like that it's pretty terrifying and honestly if every hair on my head had been standing straight up like a cartoon character it would have surprised me so when that happened we weren't near any landing strip and it was around rush hour the landing on a road which you sometimes hear planes doing was not an option because with packed up his i have to g t a lot of credit because he's really the reason that we're both still here but he found a clearing and he actually has a plane with people like oh did you just glide down on like no because when you lose speed and you lose momentum the plane starts to go down much steeper and as that happened he actually had to put us into a war of a nose dive because the clearing that he found he was afraid that if he continued on that path he would overshoot it  i remember coming terribly close to the tops of trees and high power lines and being really worried that we were going to hit them and cartwheel but we got over them and we came down into this field but the field had just been excavated for construction so i believe there's a shopping center there right now and had it had recently rained so when we hit the plane the wheels didn't roll on the ground they sank in the mud and we literally came to a full stop and fifty feet and what happened is that because we hit so hard i actually had a vertebrae in the middle of my back that burst and  if you looked at the x rays or whatever even to a layperson you'd see it look like somebody taking a black magic marker just put a line through there but i was very fortunate because when it went to hit the bone chips came out and came with the millimeters of my spinal cord wow  so that obviously would have been insult to injury right so we came to a full stop the plane was totaled and it was leaning to the side and i happened to be on the downhill side and i was in her en and imagine and i couldn't stand the thought of sitting in a chair i didn't think and actually let me even back up a little bit but when you're going down in a plane it's a very weird sensation you don't really feel like you're going down i like the ground is coming up at you ok it's very hard to explain but i've heard this from other people that i interviewed for the book and as we're going down you know people are like what went through your mind and i didn't it's not like my life flashed before my eyes it's not like i was thinking about my kids once the terror kind of faded away which happened pretty quick i became almost like so really calm and it was like i was so much detached curiosity and watching the ground coming up at me and i remember thinking oh well i guess if i get to find out whether there really is a god maybe i'll see a sign like a flash of light you know and that's a hymn probably from watching too much television in the movies but so when i did crash and i was in that and i pushed the door open and i fell in the mud and i honestly couldn't move right but as i was sitting there kind of gasping and like camping down the pain almost like lamar's breathing i was laid like i couldn't believe that i was alive it was it was beyond because as we were going down to be quite honest there was no doubt in my mind that i was about to die and so i hear owl you know yelling and making phone calls because people had been on the road and seen the plane go down including the cop which was fortunate because he could call for emergency backup  and i remember thinking oh my god maybe i'm really dead i'm not a religious person and it was just so out of the blue but al grabbed him and pulled him away and you know said get the heck away from here  but the emergency empties came pretty quickly and they decided that i need to be held act to an atlanta hospital and i remember arguing with them even through my pain i'm like how can you put me on it help cut or i was just in a plane i mean i don't want to go in a helicopter with a big normie and they stuck me on this helicopter and i know they had trouble starting an i v because my veins had started to probably know that it's a major inner city trauma center and that was my second nightmare quite honestly it was in that emergency room there were people lined up in the hallway many of them handcuffed gunshots they're worth it was crazy and honestly the hospital was filthy i was in four different i c u rooms you know as you progress to a regular room each one of them i know are don't like your details but even little had blood splatter either on the walls or on the ceiling you know food incrusted everywhere even on the inside of the m r i machine there was blood on the inside and i'm high and morphine so i'm thinking been greenwich connecticut and he happened to be visiting at the same time so he sat vigil in my room in and we had he had left instructions with the nurses asking the doctors to please come in and explaining that he was a  doctor and went and during the five days i was in there not a doctor never came in and examined me never came in to speak to me or my father apparently what they do is that they would rely on the nurses notes at the nurse's station make the recommendations and keep going down wow i mean it was a crazy place this is i c u yeah wow and then at you know i dad's a pretty calm guy you can see like the steam starting to come out of his ears you know he is so finally on recline that far so he rented an s u v where the front seat went down ok and i went in my hospital things and we drove up to connecticut and from atlanta wow and got more done with the  neurosurgeon of there on one day than we did in the entire time that i was in that hospital down there wow so it was quite an experience yeah now your brother in law when he came around to pull the preacher off he walk yes he actually was fine wow he was badly bruised on his face and his body he looked like he had been in a boxing match ok but he other than that he was fine wow so i mean how far was the crash site from where you took off was it miles or just miles and your family had your you know your niece or nephew and your children had they it or know they couldn't see it they couldn't see it but al had given my kids a walkie talkie because as you're probably familiar when you're a small plane the engines right there are very loud where you have to wear those headset so you can speak to the person next to you and he had given them a walkie worse of course so now i'm just curious since you were up front you saw the frozen propeller al obviously saw the frozen propeller what did he say you know to you he didn't say anything to me but what i do remember thinking is don't distract him right don't say a word don't touch him direct touch and every every member not knowing what to do with my hands when i hold on to here should i grip this right what do i do with my hands so he told me later that i was whimpering that it was just going no you know but i don't remember saying right right i remember though trying to distract him right so in that cessna you have to have i think strength really to navigate you know to go down particularly because things are i don't know how the propeller connects to the the is the called the yes staring mechanism so did he you know did he have to hold it just thinking the vibrations the the you know just the speed at which you were descending the it must have been lap to when the engine failed all i could hear was the wind and that that was also you know very hair raising i don't remember him struggling so much know we talked a little bit obviously prior to booking the session but you know everything that you've just said we didn't go into debt for so i don't know what my face looks like what i do are very your eyes were wide open like oh my god because you know as someone who has a queasy stomach and i'm not really into heights of the why do challenge myself to kind of get over that i just can't imagine what it would feel like to have that rapid descent you know when you know you're not in an elevator you know what's ahead right and i do understand you being calm i actually  do it's my kind of normal demeanor when there's chaos but i haven't been faced with anything like that strange strangely enough the other people who i interviewed for the book said almost the exact same thing you know even on some of the larger commercial airlines where like in movies they show people screaming you know running around that's not what happens you know when there's an emergency people get very calm and very quiet and i think in a sense it's almost because you can't really believe this is happening there is there a part of your brain that just goes this this isn't happening right right right well i think the other part too is least for me i think my mind goes into ok we've got a problem let's think about how to solve it and screaming and hollering is not going to help that so i'm thinking and thinking can what can i do what do i need to do next well you and i think similarly you know there's plenty of people that their first reaction is just start no i know that i know that but i know that you know when there's chaos i'm sitting there trying to figure out what to do right and i think that's what makes me calm so i'm not i'm like thinking of other options pilots it when you when you start going down the natural instinct just pull back like trying to put on the brakes right but what would have happened is if al of done that the plane starts to go up and if it loses its momentum it goes down when you pancake right that that would have been there would've been a way of surviving so i guess again i do credit him absolutely and i have to ask so did he buy another plane ok this is the crazy thing is that after he was working for booz allen ok  as a consultant after the crash he quit his job and became a flight instructor really and he now works for the f a a doing investigation that's actually not crazy but why did he do it because he felt that he was successful in landing the plane he thought he could teach others or is there another reason well you took he told me that he'd always loved to fly he had been in the army and he could afford the time and then he had a family couldn't have didn't have the time to do it so this was really a dream of his that he was doing and he says that the timing is coincidental and that's a sure path that i mean how do you come out of a plane crash and then he yes he's area wonderful and i was the you've gotten in planes since then so you know that has or has that impacted your thoughts about fun well i did originally swear i would never get into a plane with a single propeller ok because planes of all kinds are designed to be able to fly with without one of the engines but i broke that promise and i with actually in a single propeller plane in kenya so not only was  a single propeller plane but i was a single propeller plane in a third world country the right different safety standards landing in an air strip that dirt strip in the middle of the bush it was it was fun and it was fun yeah and you felt f doctor so that was not only convenient that he was there with you at the same time to look after you but also got you the care you needed in connecticut yeah so then what led to kind of hunting for other people to write the book there were a couple of things that happened kind of a sequence of events while i was still recovering right after the crash i wrote a story i'm a writer so that's kind of a logical way of coming to terms with what happened  ended up polishing it a little bit although when i read it now i still cringe you know because it's just awful but i submitted it to writers market writing contests that they have every year and i got honorable mention which i was very proud of because there's over people who've been in plane crashes and that really is what led to this a few years ago i had as you know people it's not a real active group but when somebody is having a bad day you know they post race is what happened so i started doing some plymouth their interviews just because i felt like this was something that people are always interested in because when you see you're in a plane crash people always want to hear what happened exactly so i disciplinary and of use and i really felt like there were something there but then i had a major health setback and i think i explained you at a stroke for years ago so obviously this project was put on hold by a year and a half ago libby philip who is the co author of the book she approached me she's the one who started the facebook group she survived a crashing they cover a lot of vancouver and she said you know you're still interested in doing this she's not a writer but i did the writing and she helped me with the research with the interviews collecting photographs kind of on the back right behind the scenes stuff that needs to happen to make them a book so we did this we got most of the interviews were people from the facebook group there's a couple of others in here that were my father was on a plane crash about a few years before mine and then after my brother was in a plane crash and i'll even add to that my mother her stepfather died in a pan am crash over brazil so and does you know those stories in your immediate i mean obviously after your plane crash you did but did you know about your mother step five zero yeah i did because she was terrified of flying all her life of prayer you know she passed a number of years read about somewhere else and i approached him and he agreed and he's interesting too because his plane went on fire so he's badly burned to me actually lost all the tips of his fingers and learned how to do surgery with you know the yeah wow yeah so there's some pretty amazing people yes that i was able to talk to and get to know through writing this book yeah so what are you sure planned for the book i mean now that it's here it's available on amazon obviously you're going to use this clip to be part of your perot yet for promotion but you know what what are you doing what are your plans with the book well i you know this whole book actually kind of came together by accident because when lindy first came to me to do this we originally thought we would just self publish something and give it to the members of our group ok but i was like you know before we get on our path to see what happens we sent proposals to fifteen publishers but as you know that industry has really had a rough time recently but we got five offers so we took the offer with this the book came out in at the end of october audible did an audio book version that just came out in december as far is publicity you know we're not going to doors right now we have some you know t v appearances that are we haven't pulled the trigger but we're keeping our fingers crossed right now that i've alerts every day that have to do with aviation and plane crashes so i comment on them and just try to keep my name out there is much as possible so did you find writing the book therapeutic i did it wasn't easy i will have to admit i mean when i was doing the interviews with some of the other people and learning more about what happened to them their experiences sometimes made mine look like a walk in the park and wow you know there there people in here who survived like for example american airlines who were at the crash and little rock and it was horrible you know and there's a woman who i interviewed and some of the things that she had to go through just to even xscape the plane that was lighting on fire were horrible a lot of people died including a lot of children and there's also another person that's in here which was really wonderful for us he joined the facebook group right about when we're trying to decide mark frank and he was a crew member for the leonard skinner band you know where the plane went down in the mid seventy's and he obviously survived that so when he agreed to be interviewed to me that was like that's my hook to have and so it's been therapeutic but i have to say too when i was doing these interviews sometimes or doing the writing sometimes i had to put it aside for a few days because it really was heavy but like to make it meaningful to somebody else you have to try to relive it and you have to try to put that down into words and you know i would break out a full body flak and even on the other side the people that are interviewed  there is one woman i think she lives in texas but she was in a small plane crash in colorado that killed her uncle and her cousin you know right in front of her and it was a horrible horrible situation and it took her days to we had to do the interview in pieces and it would take her days to kind of recover right read that and then i think her crash was ten years ago so you know even mark leonard skinner person he said that he would have nightmares for days after our conversations and you know there's a party that felt guilty right that they wanted to do it like they felt that this was part of their therapy or recovery to write right so it sounds like you all have not met in person all of the people tried yeah is that a plan in the future it least when you're maybe in a layover situation that there's not a planned kind of not even a reunion but a get together so everybody can meet when we felt when the first when the book first came out we did try to do a party of some sort but it's not so easy for everybody to fly right you know to new york or wherever so that kind of fell apart a little bit lindy i had actually never met her  when this started so i met her about halfway through the project when she came to new york city with some girlfriends a woman who's in arkansas lisa wrote she came to new york city when we were supposed to have the party that fell through because she was like i've been to new york ok so we had a little mini one right right but yes you know i've had a couple situations where people like well if you're ever in denver please call me you know if you ever hear that type of thing and i will absolutely yeah because i feel like i know them yeah this is interesting so the you know this also touches on the new economy in the sense that you are able to interview these people someone you've never met they all were agreeable to it you got into their life story something that was dramatic and and heavy and you were able to publish a book and you know that's fantastic all the internet yeah that's what i you know did some skype interviews with people in it in new zealand yeah you know because i also when it when i've written done interviews before you know you want to meet the person you want to see if they have a mannerism row or what their house looks like kind of put in those details i wasn't able to do that as much as i wanted but right i was able to get some of that in there to make it more and more into a real person somebody else could understand yeah and robin we're out of time it's already already and i have to have you back because one of the things that i wanted to talk to you about is how this bracing for impact you know the way you title your book but really how it impacted you personally we don't have time to talk about that would you be willing amazon and audible dot com