‘Unconscious’ for 4 Hours, Pilot Survives Crash in Sea : He Swims to Rescuers in Bahamas

A small plane, with its stricken pilot slumped over the controls apparently unconscious, ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean today after flying for four hours and hundreds of miles on autopilot. Astonished rescuers said the man swam toward them and was pulled alive from the water.

The pilot, identified as a Washington, D.C., lawyer, was taken by helicopter to Nassau, the Bahamas, and was to be flown by jet to Florida, the Coast Guard said.

“The words you keep hearing are: ‘You’re kidding,’ ” said Petty Officer Veronica Cady, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

Military pilots and rescuers trained to parachute into the ocean to save ditched pilots could only watch helplessly as their aircraft tracked the single-engine plane for nearly four hours while it slowly ran out of gas. The plane crashed in the Atlantic near the Bahamas.

“With all that time he didn’t answer us, no communication whatsoever, seen slumped behind the wheel, we assumed he was at the least unconscious,” Cady said. “For him to survive a crash like that, it just sent us all into shock. We didn’t expect this story to have a happy ending.”

Rescuers did not know how he got out of the plane, she said. There was no immediate word on the man’s condition.

The Federal Aviation Administration declined to identify the pilot, but staff members at the Washington law firm of Thomas Root, 36, a communications lawyer, confirmed that he was the man.

Nothing more was heard from him after he reported to air traffic controllers in Virginia at 8:30 a.m. that he was having chest pains and difficulty breathing. He had taken off from Washington’s National Airport at about 6:30 a.m. bound for Rocky Mount, N.C.

Apparently Unconscious

The man was glimpsed, apparently unconscious, at one point as the plane headed southward roughly parallel to the East Coast. There was no one else visible in the plane, and radio messages to the plane went unanswered.

The Coast Guard said the plane ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean in the central Bahamas, about 15 miles east of the island of Eleuthera. The site is about 250 miles southeast of Miami and 800 miles from the pilot’s original destination.

Reports from the planes tailing the Cessna were that “it spiraled into the water, so it didn’t make the best of all possible landings,” Chief Petty Officer Lou Parris said.

FAA spokesman Jack Barker in Atlanta said that as the plane headed southward, it had gotten as near as 100 miles from the East Coast shore because of the curvature of the coastline.

Hans Hess, manager of the Rocky Mount-Wilson, N.C., airport, said the plane had been due to arrive there at 7:49 a.m.

After its distress call, the plane was intercepted by two Marine Corps F-A-18 Hornets when it entered Norfolk Naval Station airspace at 8:45 a.m., said Lt. Cmdr. Mike John, a Navy spokesman. The pilots of the intercepting planes tried unsuccessfully to establish voice contact with the pilot.

Root’s staff gathered around a portable radio to hear news that he had been fished out of the water alive, but Signe Schilperoort, a paralegal in the office, said they had received no word on his condition from authorities.