to new beginnings with karen delk where we celebrate the wisdom creativity and courage of people creating change i am very pleased to welcome back robin hollerin author of bracing for impact it's a book about plane crash survivors and we had her on an earlier show we ran out of time and i asked her to come back to talk about how the crash impacted her life and what changes and adjustments she needed to make so welcome back thank you thank you for having me yeah and so we did run out of time the last time we spent a lot of time talking about your book and you know that was fascinating truly fascinating to talk about your book but we really didn't get a chance to touch on how this impacted your life because i would imagine you know you had burst vertebrae from neck broken back you had witnessed your kids successfully going up in this four seater plane and you know they took their turn gone for twenty minutes came back successfully you went out for your turn and shortly after you were in the air the propeller froze and this really was changing your life you didn't know what was going to happen so without i wanted to give a little bit you know to kind of set the stage but i'm more interested in having now survived the crash having the injured back you know what what was going on in your mind at the time i mean even well you're realizing that it's not going to be a safe landing it's not going to be the little quick twenty minute well the first thing i'll say is that is that is my experience was i would do it again just to make sure my kids were in that plane you know because it could have easily just as easily have been that of course and i never would have forgiven myself if it were seven to them but i think i mentioned a little bit before but when that propeller froze we were two thousand feet in the air and when we were going down honestly there was no doubt in my mind i was going to die and when we did eventually hit we hit so hard that one of the vertebrae in my back burst and i spent the next six months in a body brace that essentially went from my neck down to my hips i also but that was six months and i had to wear to sleep i had to me you know everywhere i went and then i also for at least a few weeks i can't remember exactly right right so after after i realized i was alive i was honestly elated and that really stuck with me for quite some time  for my recovery most of it revolved around the physical aspect said i spent six months and then brace and then i needed surgery after that one on my spine and so the total amount of recovery took me about two years to be fully recovered now and pretty much superglued back together and i'm fine you know i have a few restrictions on my supposed to run i'm not supposed to ride horses or jump out of airplanes or do any of those kind and things have jumped out of an airplane but prior to describe but i just everything was beautiful like life was beautiful i didn't i wasn't a what was me kind of person and i don't think i i still i'm not  r example like i remember when i first came back from the hospital and i had been gone probably about a week and i was on the couch you know and my kids came home from school they didn't know i was  there my husband had my then husband had picked them up from school and brought them home and when they walked in the door it was like i was seeing them for the first time it was it was it was amazing it was like i was looking at them and the three kids and  for right so it changed my perspective i think you were appreciative it sounds like very appreciate and very appreciative very and i think in a lot of ways they are as well of course you know they lot of my friends and i think a lot of people when mayor raising their children putting when they had the teenage years and they go through all that sassiness and you know my kids are far from perfect trust me but i didn't have any of that and after the plane crash i feel like i got to know them on a different level and i'm divorced now and i got to really know my children on my own terms and that was that's been amazing but at the same time i think that because they saw just how fragile life can be and that things can change really in the blink of an eye i think that they are they've also learned that lesson about cherishing the time that you had and like i mentioned i didn't get the sass s that a lot of people struggle i got other things but that was it it was we have a very strong relationship the three kids are very very tight and never fought amongst themselves you know i feel fortunate and the kind of relationship yeah so you went through the physical recovery what about the emotional side of it well the emotional side i was fortunate that i connected with the group which i had mentioned in the previous interview because it's very difficult to talk to somebody who hasn't been put through a plane crash about what you might be feeling so that the facebook group while it's not active i can go on the air for example i went to new orleans not too long ago and they were predicting severe thunderstorms at the time that i was supposed to land and i was in that you know i was a nervous wreck but i wasn't going to let it stop me but i went to the facebook group and i just kind of let it go and i said you know i i have never felt this nervous since my crash and somebody is suggestible why don't you tell the stewardess you know what your background is and it never dawned on me to do that and so i did when i got on i very quietly said you know i understand there's some bad weather i'm really nervous and this is the reason why and when as it turned was fine the weather wasn't as bad as it was predicted that when i was leaving she pulled me aside and she does i can't tell you how grateful i am that you told me about that because had you started acting strangely and i didn't know why i would have been very concerned  especially in this day and age unfortunately lose i had that support and then i also have the support of my father heard much as emergency room doctor not only as a doctor but he's been to a plane crash to wow and  my brother has to look we're going to have our own little bitty you know yeah family support group yeah so there's the emotional side there's the physical side what  adjustments did you have to make you know you obviously when this happened your kids were you know just on the brink of teenage years you were married at the time had to be hard you know on the marriage is a passion of mine and i've been to every continent except antarctica which i've don't intention of ever going then you've done this travel this post you know part of it was pre the crash but you've since i've traveled yeah you get the news but i didn't have to put on a brave face you know that that was hard for me i'm a very independent person and it was very hard for me to admit that it was ok to be a nervous i can't say i'm fearful because there are plenty of people i know who have never been in a crash and are far more fearful than i am but it's you know if i need a little extra help to stay on the plane and  not upset any people then i then i do it for us that i mean i know it sounds kind of strange but i didn't really have much more emotionally and i would say that very few people you know the people that i spoke to for the book the other people that i profiled a lot of them it had to make you just let some of them never fly again some of them didn't even take a train because they don't even trust anything that's a man made machine  oddly and i don't know if it's the surrogate family but my father was near fatal as well and he went to work that day after the after the plane crash that's like a lawnmower engine on any other journey and he was probably about two or three hundred feet in pancaked and it really you know that doesn't sound very high but it really is no yeah and he said he felt like he'd been in a plane crash but he i mean  in a plane crash in a car crash and he was bruised and stuff but he called me like as soon as he got in goes now we're three for three and he was like i can't wait to get back up there but i think that that's unusual you know you got to so that speaks in my mind that speaks to resilience optimism and outlook in your mindset to begin with clearly there are people like you said who suffered worst scenarios and you know perhaps they were always fearful of flying in the worst possible thing happened to them you had flown obviously many times before and you got in a small plane you know and you since have gotten into a small plane you shared that you had flown in kenya and i smashed my knee even though i had bad never to be in a single prop plane right i did it there right lost loved ones in plane crashes and then have used their grief to try to make positive change in the industry and i think that one of the things that i really learned about from interviewing them and also through what i went through person but maybe they're stronger in a sense you know like i said i compared to what some of the other people went through my was mild but there are people who stuck their head in bottles you know or worse became drug addicts  some people you know their faith in religion became stronger one person became an atheist like you don't know how many people are going to respond and i think that that's a real lesson because i think  sometimes somebody who has been through something like that the be like that was so long ago we thought you've been over it but you never never get over that anything whether you're a soldier that's coming back from war or you've had some other kind of traumatic experience it becomes a part of who you are absolutely and you don't think about it that often but sometimes something can trigger can trigger a flashback or you know some kind of setback even when you are resilient person  right so let me ask you i mean do you know what would trigger you i'm not sure i really hit it yeah except for maybe doing this book and writing this book was very very hard i mean was in two thousand and five and even as i'm speaking to you i can feel my hands sweat and it's not because we're on t v it's because i'm talking about plane crashes right and it's the same with others you know it's when you go and you talk about how it made you feel it's one thing if you're telling a story you're telling it like it happened to somebody else because we all can do that it's a cocktail conversation summary oh this is what happened blah blah blah move on to the next subject but when somebody really wants to know in depth and you start to really  it that's that's not always easy no no that's not easy so you were in the in the plane with your brother in law correct who was flown planes before it was his  place as we said your children your three children had been up in the plane same plane before you had their turn this happened you survived what was the impact on the family and what i'm going to get to and i'll ask now is you know did you think about legal action you know we're led to just society sometimes things like this could break up families well it was a little bit complicated because it was my brother my myself my sister's husband you know and in there i never ever would have sued them personally which i know had it been a stranger i'm sure that would have happened as it turns out the reason that the plane the engine froze is that there was a connecting rod in the inside of the engine that stepped and it ended up in the insurance claim what i did learn in this book maybe sound a little crazy too but you know insurance is all about numbers crunching and i had some significant yet house bills of course medical bills and when i went to the to the insured his insurance they only had ten thousand dollars and i said how can you only have ten thousand dollars and they actually told me that in most plane crashes people are not hurt or they're dead and there's very pete few people their lives with injuries right so i kind of fell in the middle of the other thing that happened is there is some federal law that protects playing and plane component manufacturers ok so if a plane is eighteen years old or older you can't make a clean against the manufacturer or the part manufacturer even if there's negligence involved you can't and that eighteen years might sound kind of old but the average age of the plane that's registered in the u s is forty five years old do you mean of those of a cessna or any plane probably private plane not not the commercial of life but the you know the ones that are you see in the smaller airports and the average age is forty five years old wow so the plane that we were in was eighteen and half years old and they couldn't track down the person who had done the engine rebuild you know the and if some please you just kind of go ok you know you just got to keep moving on but it was not a it was much smaller than you would think and the reason that they have all these protections is people die in a small plane crash with all the time every single day in the us there i would say there are three to five people or maybe not every day but within a week there's a good handful of people who die in this and you don't hear about it because it's so common and then unless there's some extenuating circumstances large commercial flight is less safe yes even the regional carrier carriers are not to say i don't know if you remember the crash in buffalo it's the last major one that we've had and it was coming in and because of mistakes the pilot made it literally went up in the air and came straight down in it and it landed on a house and they killed the man oh that was you know with several years ago right yeah at that time they  said it with a continental flight and but it turns out they had subcontractor to a regional i think it was colgan and it turns out at that time you only had to be eighteen years old to get your commercial airline pilot license and i think what you had to have some flying hours i think was only three hundred hours wow but the oversight was very loose loose and like the person with on that plane it actually failed several tests like when they have somebody go in to monitor so during the investigation when they were doing it people were shocked and they passed some legislation to make it twenty one years old which is to be still way too young to be you know flying one hundred people around the u and also if you notice on tickets where now if you buy something let's say you're flying to a small airport and it will say united is being flown by libraries that second line and that's all the result of the buffalo flight wow so was there legal action not really and there often isn't right because you are allowed to if they did allow every person who died or got hurt in a small plane crash that would be no aviation industry if they were allowed to get a large settlement right and right where you think oh you know this was trying to think because one of my children was an infant at the time it may have been two thousand when john f kennedy jr and his wife when my husband had yeah yeah that was a small one but there have been others united talked about just last year there was one where a small child you know less than twelve survived a small crash with her grandparents they both died and she walked you know walked away and last year was a terrible year even for large  planes with the examiner and absolutely absolutely and they happen yeah they definitely do they definitely do so yeah it sounds like your because just this fall you went to visit your daughter who was in cambodia vietnam and obviously you flew there you're a bit of an adventure so has this dampened your now actually quite the contrary i mean i came dangerously close you know there's that saying life is too short and i know it's way over used but i came dangerously close to learning just how true that is it's so i think that now i take a very different perspective i think that you know when you're when you're living in the suburbs and you've got it you're comfortable in your house and you're raising a family it's very easy to get too comfortable right you know almost complacent and just one day goes over the next and i now have really just tried to become an advocate for stepping outside of your comfort zone and to also to recognize when a new opportunity comes i'll give you a classic example five years after my crash my father came to me and he asked if i wanted to be sponsored he would sponsor me on a charity hike of mount kilimanjaro well that's why i was in africa and i didn't jump all over it and it wasn't that i was afraid of the climb i've done lots of hiking like camping my entire life that part didn't bother me at all what i was concerned about was meeting my children for the two weeks because i'd never been away from that one so  the reason that this is that my step brother died of aids at the beginning of the of the epidemic and my stepmother my father had started this foundation in connecticut so that was why they wanted to send me they were in their seventy's and they just didn't think that right would be able to do it themselves so what i ended up doing is ended up putting the kids together and i said ok grampa doc has offered to send me on this charity hike what do you think and my youngest kind of like rolled his eyes and he goes mom why wouldn't you and it was like one of those things like a dumb moment and he's right why wouldn't i so i immediately called my data set i'm going so here was a classic example where i was kind of in that role of being the mom thinking that i had to do x y and z and i shouldn't do this and had i not done that i would be kicking myself and i mean for the rest of my life today i would be kicking myself and i'm so glad i went because i had experiences that i never dreamed of doing because honestly climbing and not killing jar it never been on my bucket list right and i'm glad i did it and i don't have any plans on doing any height other high peaks but i mean because given that this was post the crash yes it was five years after wow wow so you're really put together with really good super good super good to get it right that is fantastic yes because that had to be strenuous even without a broken back and it if it's that part was tough and you you did you encounter any of that sickness or you know everybody did everybody did actually one third of our group had to turn back while we even had one of our the african porter s fell and conscious and had to be rushed down on a stretcher look like i've been around since world war two and he had been up and down that mountain and many many times you just can't tell right so did you reach the peak i did wow that's also so you  rying because i'm not very good with heights but how was it going down it was fine going up were very slow we did it was five days to go up you know you had to just go so far and then stay overnight and  me and then once you get to the top you really don't feel good you know you've got these headaches that are amazing everybody is nauseous and you go down and soon as you start going down all that all those symptoms start to go right  seeing in you robin you you know just even just to write the book you know as we've talked about some people don't want to relive the experience some people see it as an opportunity to kind of face it and confront it whatever it means it wasn't something obviously anyone planned but yet it happened and so some people use it as a springboard in the fact that  did you recover but then you thought well let me write a book and let me contact other people shows a real sense of courage and determination and resilience yeah i've been things that he saw coming through the emergency room so he didn't have a lot of patience for a little setback he would i was like if you were like why am i where you know as a kid he'd be like no he would like to yeah it sounds like you would yeah he really would but if you were his backup you have even more recently and i think we spoke about this before this started is my daughter was working in what human city which is right in november i went over to visit her and then went over to cambodia to ngor wot which is a lost city in the jungle and it didn't work out for my father schedule and he was so disappointed you know  he's to be turning eighty seven and had to schedule you would have been right there right worst you know it's one hundred degrees running one hundred percent humidity and that probably would have been the thing that stopped him more than anything else right but know he was all for it yeah yeah well we're just about of time but i have to ask you so with the beginning of two thousand and sixteen what is your new beginning for twenty sixty well i'm actually at a crossroads right now myself my kids are graduating college or about to graduate college you know i live in a small town in morris county which is wonderful but it's a place to raise a family and there's not much left for me so i'm in the process of deciding where i want to move to maybe start a new life i'm thinking of maybe going overseas i'm thinking of norland thinking of all kinds of things i woud yeah i don't know by then i'll keep you posted please please do it was such a pleasure to learn about your story and hear about your outlook in your approach and life you're doing things just i mean you've got a number of things that i think many people have on their bucket list you know to write books to travel and you know to recover from health crises and you've had all that we didn't really delve into that but keep and i'm hoping to write write more books tell absolutely the families say only yeah we have to we should talk about that your book is available on amazon dot com bracing for impact and we'll be looking for other books that you're going to be writing soon that's right yeah i hope so yeah thank you thank you thank you on that you receive it yeah and thank you for tuning in to new beginnings with