Unconscious Pilot Survives Crash in Ocean

In a five-hour aerial odyssey Thursday, a private plane on automatic pilot flew nearly a thousand miles with its pilot slumped unconscious in his seat before it ran out of fuel and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.

The 36-year-old flier emerged from the cockpit and swam to safety, stunning rescuers, who were sure that he was dead.

“This guy--we really didn’t think he was going to make it,” said Petty Officer Veronica Cady, who was manning a Coast Guard operations center here. “For him to survive a crash like that, it just sent us all into shock.”

Undergoes Surgery

The pilot, Washington communications lawyer Thomas Root, was reported in stable condition after undergoing surgery at Memorial Hospital in Hollywood, Fla. He apparently suffered severe abdominal injuries in the crash, but his family requested that no information be released on his injuries.

Nearly a dozen military jets had scrambled to trail the Cessna 210 Centurion on its flight, first intending to warn it away from restricted military airspace and then, as the plane maintained an ominous silence, to follow in hopes of rescuing the apparently stricken pilot when his fuel ran out.

Root had left Washington National Airport early Thursday morning on the way to a routine appointment in Rocky Mount, N. C., but radioed controllers less than an hour later to report that he was feeling ill.

“A little problem,” Root told them. “Trouble breathing. How far is it to Rocky Mount?” Silence ensued, according to a transcript of the contact released by the Federal Aviation Administration.

When two Marine FA-18 pilots intercepted the Cessna off Norfolk, Va., 45 minutes later, they saw the pilot slumped backward as the plane flew steadily to the south at an altitude of 10,000 feet.

A Coast Guard doctor who examined Root after the crash said there was no indication that he had suffered a heart attack. He theorized that Root may have suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning and been jarred to consciousness when his plane hit the water. But other experts cast doubt on that explanation. What caused Root to lose consciousness remained undetermined late Thursday.

“He is a little confused by it all,” said Dr. James Rahman, a Coast Guard captain who tended to Root after he was hoisted into a hovering Coast Guard helicopter half an hour after the crash. “He couldn’t explain it.”

Reportedly Under Stress

Several leading communications lawyers in Washington said that Root had encountered problems in his one-man legal practice and was under considerable stress. Root had missed a number of scheduled appointments recently, the lawyers said. He had also told at least one colleague in mid-March that he had passed out in his office.

Air Force officials involved in the rescue operation in waters off Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas said that Root was in pain but in good humor when they reached him. A rescue team parachuted from a specially outfitted C-130 after first dropping rafts and survival gear.

After asking a series of rapid-fire questions displaying bewilderment as to how he happened to be in the ocean, Root suddenly paused and laughed, the rescuers said, and added: “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking so much now.”

Rahman, the Coast Guard doctor, said that the pilot apparently passed out after setting his automatic pilot for an instrument course toward North Carolina. “His next sensation was water coming into the cabin,” Rahman said.

Authorities credited Root’s survival to the automatic pilot, which set the plane on a path that aroused the suspicion of the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard and then took the plane over water, where a crash could be survived.

When his wife, Kathy, 35, learned that he was alive, she “jumped off the ceiling three times,” said a neighbor, Jack McGowan.

She told reporters from her suburban Virginia home that she had prepared herself for the worst. She said she had told hospital officials to give her husband this message: “Root, you really did it this time.”

Later Thursday, in an interview with Washington, D.C., television station WUSA, Mrs. Root called her husband an “excellent” and “meticulous” pilot. She said that about two months ago “he had a sort of a fainting spell, which was checked out thoroughly by physicians and found to be nothing. They basically concluded that it was probably stress. He’s been fine since.”

Root’s flight was breathlessly reported in radio and television bulletins nationwide as his plane flew southward Thursday morning and into the afternoon. Officials speculated that he had set the automatic pilot because skies were overcast, making visual navigation difficult.

The plane stayed aloft for nearly six hours because its fuel tanks had been topped off shortly before takeoff, authorities said. Even so, the plane continued to fly far longer than some had predicted, setting nerves on edge as it entered what Air Force Lt. Don Cuttrell, co-pilot of an HE-25 Falcon jet that trailed the Cessna in its final minutes, termed “negative fuel.”

The wayward craft had been pursued by a relay team of military jets from soon after it crossed into restricted Navy airspace near Norfolk until it went into the sea 14 miles east of Eleuthera Island, in a spot 300 miles south and east of Miami.

The powerful military jets repeatedly surged ahead of the single-engine private plane and then circling behind it because they could not maintain its sluggish 105-knot pace, rescuers said.

When the fuel-depleted Cessna ultimately sputtered and stalled, banking into a steep turn and diving about 7,000 feet in just over three minutes, the rescuers were ready.

“I thought he had no chance,” said Cuttrell, the Falcon co-pilot, still aghast at the way the plane bounced off the water and spun in a full circle before its propeller caught in the water and stabilized the craft.

But the rescuers watched as Root climbed out of the cockpit and began to swim toward a smoke device the Air Force jet had dropped in the water. By the time the parachutists landed from their 3,000-foot jump, Root was leaning against one of two rescue rafts that the plane had dropped in the water.

“I’m a lawyer from Washington,” the survivor told his rescuers. “My name is Tom Root.”

“We dream about this in our rescue reserve unit,” said Sgt. David Dahl, a reservist from Seattle who was one of four parachutists who took Root from the raft and lashed him on to the rescue litter of a Coast Guard helicopter.

“It is kind of a miracle,” Dahl said. “Today I jumped out the back of an airplane and helped save a man’s life.”

The plane sank six minutes after hitting the water.

A Coast Guard spokesman said Thursday night that the flight surgeon who examined Root on his way to a Florida hospital found that his lungs were full of carbon monoxide. But a spokesman for Cessna, Dean Humphrey, said that the company’s accident investigator “could not remember ever having a pilot overcome by carbon monoxide.”

Friends described Root as a man of 14-hour workdays who found solace in the air, where, as an accomplished pilot, he had logged more than 200 hours of flying time in his six-passenger Cessna.

“He’s a young hot-shot lawyer, a very pressed man in a very stressful job,” friend and law colleague Jack Mayer told Reuters.

Root, whose practice centers on filing applications with the FCC for radio station broadcast licenses, was headed to North Carolina for a meeting with a client who hoped to establish a new FM station there.

The venture--in the name of Holy Hands FM Limited--was one of more than 150 partnerships for which Root has submitted applications to the FCC in affiliation with Sonrise Management of Columbus, Ga., in recent years, sources close to the agency said.

Staff writers David Lauter, Lori Silver and Michael Ybarra in Washington contributed to this story.