When Senior Airman Phil Owens isn’t working as a crew chief in the Virginia Air National Guard, he’s giving aerial tours of Acadia National Park in Maine. Just two weeks after starting the tour job, he experienced catastrophic engine failure and had to perform an emergency off-airport landing.
Video by Senior Airman Bryan Myhr
Transcript
I’m Phil Owens and I fly aerial tours of Acadia National Park in Maine.
And I serve. I’m a crew chief in the Virginia Air National Guard. I’m responsible for ensuring safe operations of all systems on the F-22 Raptor. The guard is part-time and that works well for me because I love flying this plane. So a tour pilot, we greet them at the front gate, we load them up in the plane. You know, take them for a ride just around Bar Harbor Maine and around Acadia National Park area. This is my first commercial flying job. I joined the Air National Guard at 17, did drills throughout my senior year of high school. Then after tech school, I used my education benefits to get a aviation degree as well as my commercial pilot’s license.
He had seconds…to make decisions and they had to be good decisions. Well, we’re flying over here in Maine. You got a lot of water and a lot of national parks so not too many good landing spots, in the case of an engine failure, but I was able to find a swamp or marsh. Kind of flared as much as I could to keep that airspeed low. So it wasn’t too, too abrupt of an impact but, you know, You definitely felt it in your seat there. a type of aircraft I A type of aircraft I fly here is a tail wheel or tail dragger. So the two wheels are up front. And so once those kind of finally set down to that marsh, the aircraft flipped over onto the top wing there. So after we flipped over, of course I unbuckled there and kind of checked on the passengers up front of me. There were two passengers that day. You know I looked at both of them and didn’t see any blood or major injuries. And they both told me they were okay. He had very little time in the biplane when this happened. And he was steady. He was cool. Couldn’t have done a better job if you had to. Did a great job. I kind of told the passengers to, you know, hold on and I’d get him down safely. And, you know, grateful I did.