March 14, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, experience the true story behind the movie "On a Wing and a Prayer" - When Doug White, his modicum of flying experience, and his powerful calm would determine his family's fate.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love hearing your story. Send them to our
American Stories dot com. They're some of our favorites. The
motion picture On a Wing and a Prayer follows passenger
Doug White's arrowing journey to safely land a plane and
(00:32):
save his entire family from insurmountable danger after their pilot
dies unexpectedly mid flight. By the way, the role is
beautifully played by Dennis Quaid. Here to share the story
is the man who lived it, Doug White. Let's take
a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Nineteen eighty nine, I was running a drug store in
little town of Maam, Louisiana m A n g h
A M. We had no doctors there, so we had
to depend on people to come from larger cities like
Monroe after they've seen the doctor and bring the prescriptions
thirty miles back to our store. Well, my store was
(01:12):
literally right beside a drug store that had been there
for one hundred years, and it was called Mangham Drug
been there Salon. Well, I wasn't out of town or
I lived thirty miles away, and I was originally wasn't
from this area. And the lady that was running the
drug store next to me was born and raised here.
Her daddy owned the cotton gin there. She graduated from
(01:34):
high school there. So, to say the least, she was
killing me in business, we were just about to starve
to death. So rather than try to beat her in business,
I just married her. We made one big drug store,
and two kids and three granddaughters later, here we are.
So fast forward to two thousand and six. I was
(01:57):
having a conversation with a friend of mine and he
had just come back from the Cooper Clinic in Dallas,
and I said, what's the Cooper Clinic? He said, you
know the guy that invented or started aerobics, doctor Ken Cooper,
And I said yeah. He said, well, he's got a
big clinic out there in Dallas. They don't accept insurance,
(02:17):
they don't do any treating, but they it's a diagnostic clinic.
They just diagnose and they've got this one test that
I went through. He said that we'll give you a
good indication if you've got any blockages in your cardiac
art reason it's non invasive like a heart cath is.
I said that sounds interesting to me. I said, I
think I'll look into that because I've got a lot
(02:38):
of heart trouble in my family on both sides. So
I talked to my wife and I said, you want
to go to Dallas for the weekend. She said yeah.
Well we went out there on Friday and I made
the deployment, went through all the tests and everything. Of course,
I've been riding a bicycle a pretty good bit, so
I had some good cardio training under my belt, and
(03:00):
we just all figured I was gonna ace all that. Well,
the lady comes out on after the treadmill. She said, well,
it was a positive test. I said, that's good. She said, no,
that's not good. Positive is bad. It means you flunked it.
I said, oh, I flunked it, yep, and I think
(03:20):
you need to have a further exam. So we did
the test where they checked your calcium in your ARTERI
is the one my buddy was telling me about. And
I flunked that one. And then they had me go
do a heart sea tea and I flunked that one.
Guy said you need to find a cardiologist. I said, man,
So I came back. That hasn't made for a long weekend.
(03:41):
I came back and I said, I filled a lot
of prescriptions for cardiologists, but I've never been to one.
Who am I gonna go? See? Well, this one guy's
name popped out that I filled a lot of prescriptions
for in local areas. I went, made the appointment with him.
He got me in in two days and he said,
you just bought yourself hart caf. I said, okay, he
(04:03):
goes in. I had an eighty percent blockage, a ninety
percent blockage, and one hundred percent blockage, and one hundred
percent the Good Lord and my body had come out
above the blockage, come out of the artery on both sides,
grown two new arteries down beside the blockage, and then
(04:24):
tied back in below the blockage. So to this day,
I've got one hundred percent blockage in me, but it's
got two arteries going around it. But all that was
done with no symptoms, riding the bicycle ten miles a day,
no shortness of breath, no nothing. I was fifty three
years old, all right, So go see my brother. I
(04:46):
had one sibling, brother named Jeff. He was two years younger.
When he was about fifty one. I want to see him,
and I said, Jeff, you need to go get a
stress test done. I said, I had two stints put
in when I he was fifty three, And I said,
we had two fifty three year old cousins had heart
attacks on one on each side of the family. Thirty
(05:07):
nine year old uncle had triple bypass, his forty five
year old brother dropped dead of a heart attack, et cetera,
et cetera. I said, you need to go get a
stress test. You're fifty one, and all these other things
happened at fifty three in our family. Well, iq wise,
my brother was probably genius, and he worked with a
bunch of doctors in an oncology clinic. He was a
(05:30):
radiation health physicist. He's the one that calibrated and set
up treating my programs for the radiation machines and the
gamma knife radiation machines. He would calibrate all that, and
he worked with a bunch of doctors, and iq wise,
he probably was smarter than they were, but sometimes he
lacked in common sense. I said, so you need to
(05:50):
go get that check, and he say, ah, they're not
going to do anything. Check your temperature, maybe get your
blood or something. He rubbed his forehead, you know, and
I said, no, it's more. Plus his wife was a nurse. Well,
he never did go and he dropped dead of a
heart attack. And guess how old he was? Fifty three.
(06:11):
So I get word on a Sunday, on a Saturday
afternoon that he had died. My mother was there because
she spent two or three months in the winter down
in Naples, Florida, and his wife was there, and so
I had to hurry up, and I found a way
to get to Naples and helped tend to that. So Monroe,
louis Ina was not a good connection that on that
(06:34):
short of notice. So I went to Jackson, Mississippi, because
that's probably two hours to the airport from me, and
flew down there on Sunday. My family came down in
the middle of the week.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you've been listening to Doug Waite tell his story.
And by the way, there's a movie based on his story.
On a Wing and a Prayer and Dennis Queed, Please
Doug Waite when we come back, more of this remarkable story,
a remarkable and rich voice from a part of our country. Oh,
there just aren't enough stories about more of Doug White's story.
(07:10):
When we continue here on our American Stories, Liehbibi here
(07:33):
the host of our American Stories.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Every day on this show, we're bringing.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our
big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do
the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click
the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go
to Auramericanstories dot com and give. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and Doug Waite's story.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So we buried my brother on Good Friday. And I
remember Friday afternoon being in his house, all the keen
folks and all the friends stuff, family friends. But from
Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, about one thirty, I don't
(08:37):
remember anything. Don't remember anything to this day. That was
in two thousand and nine. Somebody said, you remember going
out to the Japanese restaurant that night on Saturday night,
don't you? I said no, I couldn't tell you. Easter
Sunday day all went to Sunrise Church. I went to
the regular time service. I don't remember any of that.
So I knew that an air airplane from my home
(09:01):
airport had been chartered to the final day of the
Master's Golf tournament, to the Master's Final Sunday in Augusta, Georgia.
So I made a call to my buddy up there,
and I said, well, after you drop those people off
in Georgia, can you swing down here to Marco Island,
Florida and pick me and my family up flies back
(09:23):
to Monroe, and then I'll just pay you the difference
in the gasoline between a straight shot back to Monroe
and y'all looping down here. Because the charter people had
already paid for the airplane and the and the pilot
and all that, said yeah, we can do that, So
they flew down there. Of course, we were gonna come
back to Jackson first and drop me off, and then
(09:45):
he would go ahead and bring the girls on back
to Monroe. Joe K. Bucks c A. B Uk was
retired fulbird colonel and Air Force was the pilot of
the airplane. He flew down from Augusta, Georgia, and he landed.
I got on the airplane he was going because we
didn't have any return tickets from the time we went
(10:05):
down to my brother's funeral because we didn't know what
time would be coming home or when I said, you
care if I sit up front, he said, Noah, sit
right up here. Here, here's a headset, because I said,
I like looking out the window and I like to
listen to the radio communication chatter. I'd only been on
that King Air one time in my life before, and
that was a couple months earlier, and I'd asked the pilot,
(10:27):
not Joe, but another fellow, how do you talk on
the radio, And he reached over and showed me which
button to push on the yoke there at the steering wheel,
if you will. So I knew which button to push.
So I got on two months later, and Joe was
such a pro that he had both sets of radios
(10:48):
already tuned in and died to the next frequency that
we were going to need to talk to. So we
take off. We head the south towards Key West. He
makes a one to eighty and we fly up through
some clouds because we're getting beat up pretty good and
getting kicked around. He said, don't remember. Joe said, it'll
smooth out when we get up on top here, so
we popped out on top and it did smooth that well.
(11:11):
He's about when he checks in with Miami Center at
eighty five hundred feet, and you can hear it on YouTube.
You can hear him just run out of breath on
the radio because he had his finger on the push
to talk switch and he dies right there. And we're
on a two thousand foot per minuted climb on autopilot,
(11:32):
and I don't have a clue. Every two and a
half minutes we're another mile higher. So I don't know
if we're gonna run out of oxygen, if we're gonna
get to a certain heights and quit flying and just
stall and come out of the sky, which we would
have happened. I don't know, but I do know where
to push the talk button is because I'd ask the
guy two months previous, and I remembered, and I pushed
(11:53):
the button, and Joe would set the radio frequencies up
where I didn't have to try to find how to
get to Miami's in them, because I wouldn't have a
clue and it would have been dead quiet up there.
So I pushed the button and told them what was
going on and we had an emergency, and I immediately
moved to the head of the head of the line.
When you're in an airplane and you declare an emergency, you
(12:13):
moved to the head of the class quickly.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
I got declared emergency pilots to see Simon, I need
help up here. I mean, I need a King air
pilot to talk to.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
So they I started. The first fellow was not helping
me too bad, too much, because I just wanted to
stop the climb and went. It was supposed to stop
at ten thousand feet and level out, but evidently there
was a glitch or something because we blew right through
ten thousand feet. So here's eleven thy, twelve thousand, fourteen thousand, Oh.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
Lotto pilot, so once again says ten thousand, I've already
busted ten thousand a steady climbing. I need to stop
the climb. I can say, whip if nine, death of whiskey.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
I'm here, don't. I was trying to find a solution
to that as stand by one.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
So they go get a another controller in Miami named
Lisa Grimm, who also has some piloting experience. They bring
her down and they set her down beside the first
guy I was talking to, and he's working all these
airliners full of people because it's Easter Sunday. It's International
Airport in Miami. People coming in and flying out to
(13:21):
visit family and going home and all that. It was busy.
So while he's working five or six seven aircrafts full
of hundreds of people, she'll give him a hand signal.
So I gotta work this guy. So she'd take over
and say something to me for a couple of seconds,
then hand it back to him. So she convinced me
to disconnect autopilot.
Speaker 5 (13:40):
If that's a whiskey, just need to be autopilot. We're
going to have you.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
We're gonna have you hand.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Fly the plane. So she showed me where it was
at and I flipped the switch to disconnect it.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
I disengaged it. I'm flying the airplane in my hands.
You find me along with the widest way you can laugh.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Roger, Well, I know all this now. I didn't know
it then, but the airplane was trimmed to climb at
two thousand foot per minute, so the rudders and ally
runs and everything were set to climb. The nose was
up well, just because I turned off the autopilot, none
of that changes. So as soon as I clicked that
(14:20):
autopilot off, that nose that King Air was sticking straight
up in the air, and that was the heaviest thing
I'd ever grabbed a hold of my life. I thought
I'd grabbed a hold of a thousand pound gorilla. So
I tried to push the yoke forward as hard as
I could with my right hand. And I didn't know
(14:40):
it at the time, but there was a little switch
by my thumb. My left thumb is an electric trim switch.
I could have just pushed it gave myself some immediate,
immediate relief. But I didn't know anything about that. But
I knew there was a trim wheel way over on
the other side of the airplane. So I reached over
there with my left hand while I was with more
right hand. I was shoving to go forward as hard
(15:02):
as I could to keep the nose from going straight
up and stall an airplane. And I reached between the
pilot's dead leg and the panel over there, and I
got one finger on the trim control wheel, and I
was able to give myself a little bit of relief
where I could handle the airplane so they take me
over out over the Golf of Mexico. I guess maybe
(15:23):
not gonna make as big of an explosion or something.
So I'm going out over the Golf of Mexico heading west.
I've got a baby blue sky going into baby blue water,
so I have no visual reference. I mean, it's instruments
like conditions at two o'clock in the afternoon, and he's
wanted me to make a one to eighty and turn
(15:44):
back towards land. I know that, but I'm afraid to
turn the airplane. I'm afraid I'll upset it and flip
it upside down. So what should have been on maybe
a one minute turn probably took me ten or twelve
minutes because I was all tensed up.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
You showed me in a turn not moving very good here,
I know.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Still, let's take a southwest down and uh, no turn yet.
The aptitude still look good, but you're still southwest down,
pill turn right to left.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Okay, hold on.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
So I'm out over the Golf of Mexico. And I said, well,
if I turn this auto pilot back on, well that
helped me fly. And he said, yeah, you can. You
can turn that back on if you want to. So
I reached down there on the same switch and I
flipped it on. Well, what I didn't know was when
Joe had got ready to take off, he had set
the autopilot to fly due north out of South Florida,
(16:36):
do north towards the panandle of Florida. That hadn't changed either,
just because I turned it off. So I'm heading due
west out over the Gulf. When I turned the auto
pilot back on, that thing yanks around to the right
and yaws to the right real hard, wanting to fly
north like it was set to. And that kind of
scared me. So I turned it back off real quick,
and I said, no, I can't do that, messes up
(16:57):
my heading.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And you're listening to Doug White tell one heck of
a story. The movie is on a wing and a prayer.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I see it.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
By all means, it's the story of Doug White. And
by the way, Dennis Quaid does a heck of a
job playing Doug White. But this is Doug White, and
you're hearing real life audio from the tower, and my goodness,
he sounds calm. And I guess in those circumstances that's
all you've got. But how he handled himself in the cockpit.
(17:27):
It's just remarkable listening to it. My pilot is deceased,
and I need a King Air pilot to talk to.
He asks or commands. I need to stop the climb,
he says. A bit later when we come back more
of Doug White. What happens next here on our American
stories and we continue with our American stories and Doug
(18:11):
Waite's story.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Well, the people in Fort Myers, which is on the
west side of the state, at the airport, they hear
that we're coming. Miami hands them off to us to
Fort Myers and they hear we're coming. So the Fort
Myers Airport gets shut down. Nobody's coming in and nobody's leaving.
Dan Fabio is one of the controllers at Fort Myers.
(18:39):
Fav is in Victor I O Dan Fobyo Fa. He
hears us a King Air coming in the King Airs
in trouble, and he remembers that he has a good
friend in Danbury, Connecticut. There has a lot of King
Air experience. That's where Dan used to work. His friend
in Connecticut's name is Carrie ka r I Kerry Sorenson.
(19:00):
He gets on his cell phone calls Carrie Sorenson. CARRIEUS, Hey, buddy,
what's going on? Carrie. I don't have time to chat
right now. I got a King Air in trouble. I
need your help. Carrie had been riding around Danbury, Connecticut
that day, and he's old. He's got old model t
or a model, a antique car, and he was a
pretty day and he's riding around with his girlfriend Ashley.
(19:23):
He wasn't even at the house, but he had to
come back by the house for something, use the restroom
or get something. And that exact moment when he's at
his house is when Dan calls him. He said, what
can I do for you? He said, he doesn't know
anything about a King Air. So Carrie runs down to
his basement in Danbury, Connecticut. He's got a King Air
(19:45):
a poster of the cockpit of a King Air on
the wall of his office. So he sits down. He's
looking at the exact same thing I'm looking at. And
Brian Norton is another controller in Fort Myers. He's his
shift is over over. He's leaving the tower when I
think it's two o'clock local time. He's out in the
park a lot. But he's got a little bit of
(20:05):
piloting experience. Nothing as complex as a King Air, but
little cherokees and cessing one seventy two's and such. He's
going home. His supervisor runs out of the tower, runs
out in the park a lot and gets Brian and
ask him to come back in and sit down and
help work us. So Brian's sitting there talking to me
(20:26):
in the radio. Dan Fabio is sitting beside Brian talking
to Carry Sorenson twelve hundred miles away in a cellphone.
So Carrie would say, tell him he needs to drop
flaps when he gets ready to land, and the flap
setting is right beside his left luck, So he'd tell
Dan that. Dan would tell Brian that Brian would tell
(20:48):
it to me, and I'd say, got it. And I said, well,
how fast do I need to go without stalling this airplane?
Say stand by Ity's, Danny's how fast they have to
go without stalling this airplane? He does care and Carry
would tell him. Dan would tell Brian, and Brian would
tell me. That's how they went back and forth for
twenty or twenty five minutes. That's how they just thinking
on their feet. And I was told later that the
(21:10):
NTSB that investigates crashes had already released a crash or
a rescue not a rescue plane, a recovery plane maybe
out of Atlanta, was en route, and they turned the
airplane around later and sent them back home. And it's
the first time in history that the NTSB had ever
(21:32):
turned a recovery plane around. So we come in. When
I finally get turned around and I can see land,
I'm getting a little bit more comfortable. I can see
a strip of a runway out there at ten or
twelve miles, looks like a little one inch strip. But
now it's all gonna be just depth perception and I
(21:52):
hand coordination. Don't get too slow, don't get too low
and all that. So they tell me where the knob
is is to drop the landing gear, and when to
drop the landing gear and all that.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
Now, when I would charged the throttle here in a minute,
I need to know what's indicated to go.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
To nine Delawhitski Rader. We'll just return them slowly. You
could start now in your discretion, a little bit at
a time, and when you get to one hundred and
fifty nins I'm told you can drop the gear in
the flights.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
And they said later that I was coming in too low.
A matter of fact, Brian told me one time in
the radio, said, you've got twelve thousand feet a runway
if you want to add some more power to it,
because they see I could my attitude or my angle
descent was too low. Well, the reason for that was,
and I know all this now, I didn't know it then,
those big white marks on the end of a runway
(22:43):
or a thousand feet from down from the end, and
that's what your landing point is. That's where all the
black tire marks are. That's where all the airliners dry.
The land is one thousand foot from the end. Well,
I didn't know any of that.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
Nine Delwhitschki Radgier. It looks good from here. Good job.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
It ain't no work tiltober my landing point. My focus
was on the very first inch of concrete or that runway.
That's what I was looking at, not a thousand foot
down road. So that's why my angle of decent was
so uh shallow compared to normal. Well, I touch down.
Speaker 5 (23:17):
If I ever touched down, I just kill the cattle
for what that's correct. When you touchdowns below. We killed
the trottle here.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
So we finally got it down and now I can
tax it off the runway.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
Named Devil Whiskey. When you're ready, you can go to
ground frequency one two one point nine and that's.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Work one two one point nine. Thank you. And I'm
sitting there and my headsets moving back and forth. So
I tell the controller, the ground controller who I'm talking to, now, look,
can you have those airliners move or can I turn
sideways or something? Because they're they're prop blasted or jet
(23:57):
blast is blowing my headset back here. He said, no,
you're fine, just stay right where you're at. What I
didn't realize I had a double inch, double pain insulated
windshield in front of me. That wasn't a yet blast.
It was coming through that windshield blowing my headset. It
was my pulse beating so hard it was actually literally
moving my headset back and forth. So one of the
(24:18):
mts or one of the firemen gets out in front
of the King air and he starts giving a signal
across his neck. You know, cut the engines. Cut the engines. Okay,
I get it, but guess what, I don't know how
to cut the engines off. So I said, we just
went through all this thing for forty five or fifty minutes.
Now I'm going to cut somebody's head off. So one
(24:39):
of the airline pilots that was waiting to take off
was listening to all this. He came on the radio
with the controller and volunteered. He said, look, I've got
a lot of time in the king here. I can
help him turn those engines off if you want me to.
And he says, yeah, go ahead. So he walked me
through how to turn the engines off. I just started
a fuel and we got the door open, and EMT's
(25:01):
came in and got Joe and took him off, started
working on him. But when I came I remember I
told you I came through those clouds on the way
up because it's so bumpy. Well, when I was at
altitude out over the Gulf of Mexico and I finally
got turned around heading towards land, you know I'm eleven
twelve thousand feet high. I've got to come back down
(25:23):
to land. Obviously in that part of the state, that
part of the country's at sea level. Well, when I
come back down, I did not come back down through
any clouds, because if I would have, i'd have been
a duster because that's instrument flying conditions. You can't see
inside of a cloud, so you have to do everything
by instruments, and which would have been, you know, way
(25:43):
out of my leg. But when I started coming back down,
the clouds were not off there. We just gone through
them thirty minutes ago, and when I started to descnth
they disappeared. And we're on final approach in Florida at
the beach in April, in the middle afternoon, and there's
no win none a matter of fact. Brian Nortony says,
(26:06):
Win's virtually calm because I ask him two or three
times about to win, because been a regular win, I
mean I wouldn't even hit the concrete. And Dan five
yoh's talking to Carry up in Connecticut and he says
they're down, buddy, I'll call you back and he hangs up. Well,
that leaves carrying a lurch up in Connecticut. Because when
(26:26):
you're dealing with an airplane, somebody says they're down, that
could mean two or three different thoughts.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And we're listening to Doug Waite, He's just successfully landed
a King Air and by the way his family was
on the plane, and all of us listening to this
kept wondering to ourselves, could we have done this? Something
tells me, when you're the dad and you got to
bring it home, you bring it home. And something kicked in,
some gear kicked in where he knew he.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Had to do it.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Doug
Waite's story. The movie is On a Wing and a Prayer.
Dennis Quaid plays Doug White. When we come back more
of the real life Doug White with the rest of
this story. Here on our American stories, and we return
(27:38):
to our American stories and to Doug White, whose stories
spawned the Hollywood motion picture On a Wing and a
Prayer starring Dennis Quaid. We will also be listening to
Doug after receiving an Archie League Medal of Safety Award.
The Archie League Award is considered to be the highest
honor in the air traffic control profession. Here's Doug picking
(27:59):
up the story of the chain of King Air airplane
experts helping Doug control and land after his pilot unexpectedly died.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
And Dan five yo is talking to carry up in
Connecticut and he says they're down, buddy, I'll call you back,
and he hangs up. Well, that leaves Carrying alert up
in Connecticut, because when you're dealing with an airplane, somebody
says they're down, that could mean two or three different thoughts. Well,
when it's over with, Dan gets ready to call Carry
(28:32):
back and his cell phones did. I don't mean he
had to go charge his battery up or get a
new battery. He had to get a new cell phone.
But he didn't even know Carry's phone number, and Brian Norton,
sitting beside him, didn't even know Carrie's name. But Dan's
cell phone stayed charged up just long enough for Carrie
(28:54):
to help us get down land safely. And there's no
win and the clouds disappeared. But I know who's to
control of the weather, and I know who was in
control of that whole event. I know God's not done
with us yet. The American people buying large are very
(29:18):
resourceful people. The great majority of people in this country
have a lot of individual initiative. There are exceptions. We
know who they are because our taxpayer dollars help them
be that way. But over the years, the American people
have seen problems, and they've seen issues and we've worked
(29:39):
ourselves around them, over them. We've been venting things to
make our life easier and fixed stuff. We've invented things
like well they airplane for instance, because you know, help
us get around better, and cars and telephones and televisions
and whatnot, because we have initiative. But there's one thing
that I found in my lifetime that will knock down
(30:02):
the resourcefulness of an individual quickly. It will absolutely bury
individual initiatives every time, and that is bureaucracy of any sort.
You see, bureaucrats think they're smarter than us regular joes.
(30:22):
Bureaucrats see a problem like y'all do, and they have
to form a committee to figure out what to do.
A month down the road, the problem is still there,
and they've got to form another committee to oversee the
first committee and the problem is still there. Then they've
got to pass the resolution to give themselves permission to
study the problem that they got there with the first place,
(30:43):
and then they have to have quorums. It takes bureaucrats
an hour and a half to watch sixty minutes. But
this bunch on Easter Sunday, these folks had a problem
that they faced on that day, and they didn't form
(31:04):
a committee to figure out what to do. They just
got it done. They didn't pass a resolution because that's
where they are. You can't train for this people. I
guarantee you in your OPS manual. Sounds fancy. I assume
(31:25):
you've got something like an OPS manuel. It doesn't say
when King air pilot dies. Go down to another sector.
Get a woman who has some piloting experience, bring her
up here, sit her down beside you, and while you're
working all these airliners full of hundreds of people. When
(31:47):
she gets enough, make a signal to let her working
and let convince them to take care of take the
autopilot off. If that doesn't work, go to subsection B.
Get on a cell phone, call a buddy lives one
thousand miles from here that has King hair experience, and
(32:08):
talk ten on a cell phone that is not there.
It's individual initiative that gets it done. Those are some
of the divine things fell into place. So fast forward
(32:32):
to now, well back it up four or five years ago.
Brian Eggiston E G. E.
Speaker 5 (32:40):
S T.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
A Win. He used to he was a writer. He
used to write for the Tyler Perry Show. But he's
was wanting to learn how to fly, so he took
two or three hours of flying lessons and they said, well,
you don't need to fly in more for a while.
You need to learn how to talk on the radio first,
and then we'll get back in there. So he's in
(33:00):
the room over there in the land and doing his
flight training and they put air traffic Control conversation on.
He's got to listen to it, listen to how the
lingo is and how they talk and all that, and
what he ends up listening to is the actual forty
five minute recording of our incident. And that enthralled him
so much that he made an effort to try to
(33:22):
get a hold of me. Well, he went to the
old standard route of trying to find me. He found
me through one of my kids on Facebook. He said,
are you the one you and your dad and mama
were on the airplane that the pilot passed away and
londy dotty dotty and yes, sir, would you give me
your dad's mailing address? So Brian sent me a real
nice letter about five years ago, told me who he was,
(33:45):
said he's a screenwriter. I said he was a fledgling pilot,
and he was a Christian, and he wanted to know
if I cared if he wrote a screenplay about the event.
I said, no, I don't care. And by the way,
that air traffic control tape, that recording of forty something
minutes is used today and has been used for several
(34:06):
years now in training by the FAA when they're training
new controllers and also when they're recertified him. It's training
them what to do and what not to do in
an emergency situation like that. So Brian, I said, yeah,
that'd be fine. I don't care. So he said, would
you mind if I come to your house interview? And
I said no, I don't care about that either. So
he loaded up. He drove to Archi of all louis
(34:27):
In and he's pickup truck, and he spent about three
days with us, and he had his tape recorder and
he'd asked me a question. Sometimes he'd pushed record and
he wouldn't say anything for two hours, and he just
recorded everything. I took in my little golf course and
took him to our little church and fed him and
all that, and we ended up being real close. We
(34:49):
talked about a few things we'd like to have in
the film, and a few things we didn't need in
the film. We're all agreed with that. And he went
back and got busy. In six weeks or so long,
he sent me a script. It was called Flying by
Faith was the title he put on. And I liked it.
I said, let's go with it. So he spent the
(35:09):
last four or five years trying to sell that, and
he'd just get pretty close with one of the studios
and the guy would retire, or he'd get fired, or
he change jobs or something, so we have to start
all over again. As a matter of fact, MGM turned
it down two or three years ago. Well, then they
got across on Roma down his desk. Roma and her husband,
(35:30):
Mark Burnett run the faith based section of MGM called
Light Workers, and she fell in love with the script
and she went home. She told Mark, she said, you
need to read this, and she said, Mark Burnett has
never read a script, can't stand to read a movie script.
But he read this one and he fell in love
with it. And they picked it back up and they
(35:50):
made the film as MGM, even though they turned it
down a couple of years, a different department of MGM
and turned it down a couple of years previous. In
the meantime, she gets ahold of Dennis Quaid. He was
working on another project with her. She said, Dennis, I
think you'd be perfect to play Doug White in this film.
He said, you're a pilot, you're from the South, et cetera.
(36:13):
She said, what, yeah, let me read it. So we
came back. He said, I'd love to do that film.
So they got Dennis Quaid on board, and in the meantime,
Amazon has since bought MGM, so Jeff Bezos and Amazon
owns MGM now and they we're gonna release this film
last August or so, but they got moved up. And
(36:36):
I think by divine intervention it's a lot better idea anyway.
And it's gonna be released on Easter weekend this year
under the name of On a Wing and a Prayer.
MGM changed it to the title of On a Wing
and a Prayer, So that's gonna be released on Good Friday,
which is April seventh, twenty three this year. Because the
whole incident originally took place on Easter Sunday and the
(36:59):
papers and South Florida called it the East America. So
fourteen years after the fact, we're still here, got three
granddaughters later, and the movie's coming out, and we hope
it is a home run for the studios, and we
hope it's a home run for the church throughout the world,
(37:19):
and we hope it's a home run for Brian Naguson's
professional career. I'm hoping it does real well for Amazon.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Thank you for listening, and a terrific job on the
production editing and storytelling by our own Greg Angler, and
a special thanks to Doug Waite for sharing his story.
The movie based on this story on a Wing and
a Prayer with Dennis Quaid playing Doug Waite, and my goodness,
what an authentic voice and what an authentic sounding solution
(37:48):
to a problem. And we know what he's talking about
when he talks about how Americans can just well get
things done. And we all know what bureaucracies look and
feel like in the public and the private sector, and
it's not pleasant. Heck, what's the theories the office about,
if anything, but how silly and goofy working in large
bureaucracies can be and what they can feel like. Doug
(38:11):
White's story here on our American stories,
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love hearing your story. Send them to our
American Stories dot com. They're some of our favorites. The
motion picture On a Wing and a Prayer follows passenger
Doug White's arrowing journey to safely land a plane and
(00:32):
save his entire family from insurmountable danger after their pilot
dies unexpectedly mid flight. By the way, the role is
beautifully played by Dennis Quaid. Here to share the story
is the man who lived it, Doug White. Let's take
a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Nineteen eighty nine, I was running a drug store in
little town of Maam, Louisiana m A n g h
A M. We had no doctors there, so we had
to depend on people to come from larger cities like
Monroe after they've seen the doctor and bring the prescriptions
thirty miles back to our store. Well, my store was
(01:12):
literally right beside a drug store that had been there
for one hundred years, and it was called Mangham Drug
been there Salon. Well, I wasn't out of town or
I lived thirty miles away, and I was originally wasn't
from this area. And the lady that was running the
drug store next to me was born and raised here.
Her daddy owned the cotton gin there. She graduated from
(01:34):
high school there. So, to say the least, she was
killing me in business, we were just about to starve
to death. So rather than try to beat her in business,
I just married her. We made one big drug store,
and two kids and three granddaughters later, here we are.
So fast forward to two thousand and six. I was
(01:57):
having a conversation with a friend of mine and he
had just come back from the Cooper Clinic in Dallas,
and I said, what's the Cooper Clinic? He said, you
know the guy that invented or started aerobics, doctor Ken Cooper,
And I said yeah. He said, well, he's got a
big clinic out there in Dallas. They don't accept insurance,
(02:17):
they don't do any treating, but they it's a diagnostic clinic.
They just diagnose and they've got this one test that
I went through. He said that we'll give you a
good indication if you've got any blockages in your cardiac
art reason it's non invasive like a heart cath is.
I said that sounds interesting to me. I said, I
think I'll look into that because I've got a lot
(02:38):
of heart trouble in my family on both sides. So
I talked to my wife and I said, you want
to go to Dallas for the weekend. She said yeah.
Well we went out there on Friday and I made
the deployment, went through all the tests and everything. Of course,
I've been riding a bicycle a pretty good bit, so
I had some good cardio training under my belt, and
(03:00):
we just all figured I was gonna ace all that. Well,
the lady comes out on after the treadmill. She said, well,
it was a positive test. I said, that's good. She said, no,
that's not good. Positive is bad. It means you flunked it.
I said, oh, I flunked it, yep, and I think
(03:20):
you need to have a further exam. So we did
the test where they checked your calcium in your ARTERI
is the one my buddy was telling me about. And
I flunked that one. And then they had me go
do a heart sea tea and I flunked that one.
Guy said you need to find a cardiologist. I said, man,
So I came back. That hasn't made for a long weekend.
(03:41):
I came back and I said, I filled a lot
of prescriptions for cardiologists, but I've never been to one.
Who am I gonna go? See? Well, this one guy's
name popped out that I filled a lot of prescriptions
for in local areas. I went, made the appointment with him.
He got me in in two days and he said,
you just bought yourself hart caf. I said, okay, he
(04:03):
goes in. I had an eighty percent blockage, a ninety
percent blockage, and one hundred percent blockage, and one hundred
percent the Good Lord and my body had come out
above the blockage, come out of the artery on both sides,
grown two new arteries down beside the blockage, and then
(04:24):
tied back in below the blockage. So to this day,
I've got one hundred percent blockage in me, but it's
got two arteries going around it. But all that was
done with no symptoms, riding the bicycle ten miles a day,
no shortness of breath, no nothing. I was fifty three
years old, all right, So go see my brother. I
(04:46):
had one sibling, brother named Jeff. He was two years younger.
When he was about fifty one. I want to see him,
and I said, Jeff, you need to go get a
stress test done. I said, I had two stints put
in when I he was fifty three, And I said,
we had two fifty three year old cousins had heart
attacks on one on each side of the family. Thirty
(05:07):
nine year old uncle had triple bypass, his forty five
year old brother dropped dead of a heart attack, et cetera,
et cetera. I said, you need to go get a
stress test. You're fifty one, and all these other things
happened at fifty three in our family. Well, iq wise,
my brother was probably genius, and he worked with a
bunch of doctors in an oncology clinic. He was a
(05:30):
radiation health physicist. He's the one that calibrated and set
up treating my programs for the radiation machines and the
gamma knife radiation machines. He would calibrate all that, and
he worked with a bunch of doctors, and iq wise,
he probably was smarter than they were, but sometimes he
lacked in common sense. I said, so you need to
(05:50):
go get that check, and he say, ah, they're not
going to do anything. Check your temperature, maybe get your
blood or something. He rubbed his forehead, you know, and
I said, no, it's more. Plus his wife was a nurse. Well,
he never did go and he dropped dead of a
heart attack. And guess how old he was? Fifty three.
(06:11):
So I get word on a Sunday, on a Saturday
afternoon that he had died. My mother was there because
she spent two or three months in the winter down
in Naples, Florida, and his wife was there, and so
I had to hurry up, and I found a way
to get to Naples and helped tend to that. So Monroe,
louis Ina was not a good connection that on that
(06:34):
short of notice. So I went to Jackson, Mississippi, because
that's probably two hours to the airport from me, and
flew down there on Sunday. My family came down in
the middle of the week.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you've been listening to Doug Waite tell his story.
And by the way, there's a movie based on his story.
On a Wing and a Prayer and Dennis Queed, Please
Doug Waite when we come back, more of this remarkable story,
a remarkable and rich voice from a part of our country. Oh,
there just aren't enough stories about more of Doug White's story.
(07:10):
When we continue here on our American Stories, Liehbibi here
(07:33):
the host of our American Stories.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Every day on this show, we're bringing.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our
big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do
the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click
the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go
to Auramericanstories dot com and give. And we continue with
(08:10):
our American Stories and Doug Waite's story.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So we buried my brother on Good Friday. And I
remember Friday afternoon being in his house, all the keen
folks and all the friends stuff, family friends. But from
Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, about one thirty, I don't
(08:37):
remember anything. Don't remember anything to this day. That was
in two thousand and nine. Somebody said, you remember going
out to the Japanese restaurant that night on Saturday night,
don't you? I said no, I couldn't tell you. Easter
Sunday day all went to Sunrise Church. I went to
the regular time service. I don't remember any of that.
So I knew that an air airplane from my home
(09:01):
airport had been chartered to the final day of the
Master's Golf tournament, to the Master's Final Sunday in Augusta, Georgia.
So I made a call to my buddy up there,
and I said, well, after you drop those people off
in Georgia, can you swing down here to Marco Island,
Florida and pick me and my family up flies back
(09:23):
to Monroe, and then I'll just pay you the difference
in the gasoline between a straight shot back to Monroe
and y'all looping down here. Because the charter people had
already paid for the airplane and the and the pilot
and all that, said yeah, we can do that, So
they flew down there. Of course, we were gonna come
back to Jackson first and drop me off, and then
(09:45):
he would go ahead and bring the girls on back
to Monroe. Joe K. Bucks c A. B Uk was
retired fulbird colonel and Air Force was the pilot of
the airplane. He flew down from Augusta, Georgia, and he landed.
I got on the airplane he was going because we
didn't have any return tickets from the time we went
(10:05):
down to my brother's funeral because we didn't know what
time would be coming home or when I said, you
care if I sit up front, he said, Noah, sit
right up here. Here, here's a headset, because I said,
I like looking out the window and I like to
listen to the radio communication chatter. I'd only been on
that King Air one time in my life before, and
that was a couple months earlier, and I'd asked the pilot,
(10:27):
not Joe, but another fellow, how do you talk on
the radio, And he reached over and showed me which
button to push on the yoke there at the steering wheel,
if you will. So I knew which button to push.
So I got on two months later, and Joe was
such a pro that he had both sets of radios
(10:48):
already tuned in and died to the next frequency that
we were going to need to talk to. So we
take off. We head the south towards Key West. He
makes a one to eighty and we fly up through
some clouds because we're getting beat up pretty good and
getting kicked around. He said, don't remember. Joe said, it'll
smooth out when we get up on top here, so
we popped out on top and it did smooth that well.
(11:11):
He's about when he checks in with Miami Center at
eighty five hundred feet, and you can hear it on YouTube.
You can hear him just run out of breath on
the radio because he had his finger on the push
to talk switch and he dies right there. And we're
on a two thousand foot per minuted climb on autopilot,
(11:32):
and I don't have a clue. Every two and a
half minutes we're another mile higher. So I don't know
if we're gonna run out of oxygen, if we're gonna
get to a certain heights and quit flying and just
stall and come out of the sky, which we would
have happened. I don't know, but I do know where
to push the talk button is because I'd ask the
guy two months previous, and I remembered, and I pushed
(11:53):
the button, and Joe would set the radio frequencies up
where I didn't have to try to find how to
get to Miami's in them, because I wouldn't have a
clue and it would have been dead quiet up there.
So I pushed the button and told them what was
going on and we had an emergency, and I immediately
moved to the head of the head of the line.
When you're in an airplane and you declare an emergency, you
(12:13):
moved to the head of the class quickly.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
I got declared emergency pilots to see Simon, I need
help up here. I mean, I need a King air
pilot to talk to.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
So they I started. The first fellow was not helping
me too bad, too much, because I just wanted to
stop the climb and went. It was supposed to stop
at ten thousand feet and level out, but evidently there
was a glitch or something because we blew right through
ten thousand feet. So here's eleven thy, twelve thousand, fourteen thousand, Oh.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
Lotto pilot, so once again says ten thousand, I've already
busted ten thousand a steady climbing. I need to stop
the climb. I can say, whip if nine, death of whiskey.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
I'm here, don't. I was trying to find a solution
to that as stand by one.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
So they go get a another controller in Miami named
Lisa Grimm, who also has some piloting experience. They bring
her down and they set her down beside the first
guy I was talking to, and he's working all these
airliners full of people because it's Easter Sunday. It's International
Airport in Miami. People coming in and flying out to
(13:21):
visit family and going home and all that. It was busy.
So while he's working five or six seven aircrafts full
of hundreds of people, she'll give him a hand signal.
So I gotta work this guy. So she'd take over
and say something to me for a couple of seconds,
then hand it back to him. So she convinced me
to disconnect autopilot.
Speaker 5 (13:40):
If that's a whiskey, just need to be autopilot. We're
going to have you.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
We're gonna have you hand.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Fly the plane. So she showed me where it was
at and I flipped the switch to disconnect it.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
I disengaged it. I'm flying the airplane in my hands.
You find me along with the widest way you can laugh.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Roger, Well, I know all this now. I didn't know
it then, but the airplane was trimmed to climb at
two thousand foot per minute, so the rudders and ally
runs and everything were set to climb. The nose was
up well, just because I turned off the autopilot, none
of that changes. So as soon as I clicked that
(14:20):
autopilot off, that nose that King Air was sticking straight
up in the air, and that was the heaviest thing
I'd ever grabbed a hold of my life. I thought
I'd grabbed a hold of a thousand pound gorilla. So
I tried to push the yoke forward as hard as
I could with my right hand. And I didn't know
(14:40):
it at the time, but there was a little switch
by my thumb. My left thumb is an electric trim switch.
I could have just pushed it gave myself some immediate,
immediate relief. But I didn't know anything about that. But
I knew there was a trim wheel way over on
the other side of the airplane. So I reached over
there with my left hand while I was with more
right hand. I was shoving to go forward as hard
(15:02):
as I could to keep the nose from going straight
up and stall an airplane. And I reached between the
pilot's dead leg and the panel over there, and I
got one finger on the trim control wheel, and I
was able to give myself a little bit of relief
where I could handle the airplane so they take me
over out over the Golf of Mexico. I guess maybe
(15:23):
not gonna make as big of an explosion or something.
So I'm going out over the Golf of Mexico heading west.
I've got a baby blue sky going into baby blue water,
so I have no visual reference. I mean, it's instruments
like conditions at two o'clock in the afternoon, and he's
wanted me to make a one to eighty and turn
(15:44):
back towards land. I know that, but I'm afraid to
turn the airplane. I'm afraid I'll upset it and flip
it upside down. So what should have been on maybe
a one minute turn probably took me ten or twelve
minutes because I was all tensed up.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
You showed me in a turn not moving very good here,
I know.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Still, let's take a southwest down and uh, no turn yet.
The aptitude still look good, but you're still southwest down,
pill turn right to left.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Okay, hold on.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
So I'm out over the Golf of Mexico. And I said, well,
if I turn this auto pilot back on, well that
helped me fly. And he said, yeah, you can. You
can turn that back on if you want to. So
I reached down there on the same switch and I
flipped it on. Well, what I didn't know was when
Joe had got ready to take off, he had set
the autopilot to fly due north out of South Florida,
(16:36):
do north towards the panandle of Florida. That hadn't changed either,
just because I turned it off. So I'm heading due
west out over the Gulf. When I turned the auto
pilot back on, that thing yanks around to the right
and yaws to the right real hard, wanting to fly
north like it was set to. And that kind of
scared me. So I turned it back off real quick,
and I said, no, I can't do that, messes up
(16:57):
my heading.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And you're listening to Doug White tell one heck of
a story. The movie is on a wing and a prayer.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I see it.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
By all means, it's the story of Doug White. And
by the way, Dennis Quaid does a heck of a
job playing Doug White. But this is Doug White, and
you're hearing real life audio from the tower, and my goodness,
he sounds calm. And I guess in those circumstances that's
all you've got. But how he handled himself in the cockpit.
(17:27):
It's just remarkable listening to it. My pilot is deceased,
and I need a King Air pilot to talk to.
He asks or commands. I need to stop the climb,
he says. A bit later when we come back more
of Doug White. What happens next here on our American
stories and we continue with our American stories and Doug
(18:11):
Waite's story.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Well, the people in Fort Myers, which is on the
west side of the state, at the airport, they hear
that we're coming. Miami hands them off to us to
Fort Myers and they hear we're coming. So the Fort
Myers Airport gets shut down. Nobody's coming in and nobody's leaving.
Dan Fabio is one of the controllers at Fort Myers.
(18:39):
Fav is in Victor I O Dan Fobyo Fa. He
hears us a King Air coming in the King Airs
in trouble, and he remembers that he has a good
friend in Danbury, Connecticut. There has a lot of King
Air experience. That's where Dan used to work. His friend
in Connecticut's name is Carrie ka r I Kerry Sorenson.
(19:00):
He gets on his cell phone calls Carrie Sorenson. CARRIEUS, Hey, buddy,
what's going on? Carrie. I don't have time to chat
right now. I got a King Air in trouble. I
need your help. Carrie had been riding around Danbury, Connecticut
that day, and he's old. He's got old model t
or a model, a antique car, and he was a
pretty day and he's riding around with his girlfriend Ashley.
(19:23):
He wasn't even at the house, but he had to
come back by the house for something, use the restroom
or get something. And that exact moment when he's at
his house is when Dan calls him. He said, what
can I do for you? He said, he doesn't know
anything about a King Air. So Carrie runs down to
his basement in Danbury, Connecticut. He's got a King Air
(19:45):
a poster of the cockpit of a King Air on
the wall of his office. So he sits down. He's
looking at the exact same thing I'm looking at. And
Brian Norton is another controller in Fort Myers. He's his
shift is over over. He's leaving the tower when I
think it's two o'clock local time. He's out in the
park a lot. But he's got a little bit of
(20:05):
piloting experience. Nothing as complex as a King Air, but
little cherokees and cessing one seventy two's and such. He's
going home. His supervisor runs out of the tower, runs
out in the park a lot and gets Brian and
ask him to come back in and sit down and
help work us. So Brian's sitting there talking to me
(20:26):
in the radio. Dan Fabio is sitting beside Brian talking
to Carry Sorenson twelve hundred miles away in a cellphone.
So Carrie would say, tell him he needs to drop
flaps when he gets ready to land, and the flap
setting is right beside his left luck, So he'd tell
Dan that. Dan would tell Brian that Brian would tell
(20:48):
it to me, and I'd say, got it. And I said, well,
how fast do I need to go without stalling this airplane?
Say stand by Ity's, Danny's how fast they have to
go without stalling this airplane? He does care and Carry
would tell him. Dan would tell Brian, and Brian would
tell me. That's how they went back and forth for
twenty or twenty five minutes. That's how they just thinking
on their feet. And I was told later that the
(21:10):
NTSB that investigates crashes had already released a crash or
a rescue not a rescue plane, a recovery plane maybe
out of Atlanta, was en route, and they turned the
airplane around later and sent them back home. And it's
the first time in history that the NTSB had ever
(21:32):
turned a recovery plane around. So we come in. When
I finally get turned around and I can see land,
I'm getting a little bit more comfortable. I can see
a strip of a runway out there at ten or
twelve miles, looks like a little one inch strip. But
now it's all gonna be just depth perception and I
(21:52):
hand coordination. Don't get too slow, don't get too low
and all that. So they tell me where the knob
is is to drop the landing gear, and when to
drop the landing gear and all that.
Speaker 4 (22:04):
Now, when I would charged the throttle here in a minute,
I need to know what's indicated to go.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
To nine Delawhitski Rader. We'll just return them slowly. You
could start now in your discretion, a little bit at
a time, and when you get to one hundred and
fifty nins I'm told you can drop the gear in
the flights.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
And they said later that I was coming in too low.
A matter of fact, Brian told me one time in
the radio, said, you've got twelve thousand feet a runway
if you want to add some more power to it,
because they see I could my attitude or my angle
descent was too low. Well, the reason for that was,
and I know all this now, I didn't know it then,
those big white marks on the end of a runway
(22:43):
or a thousand feet from down from the end, and
that's what your landing point is. That's where all the
black tire marks are. That's where all the airliners dry.
The land is one thousand foot from the end. Well,
I didn't know any of that.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
Nine Delwhitschki Radgier. It looks good from here. Good job.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
It ain't no work tiltober my landing point. My focus
was on the very first inch of concrete or that runway.
That's what I was looking at, not a thousand foot
down road. So that's why my angle of decent was
so uh shallow compared to normal. Well, I touch down.
Speaker 5 (23:17):
If I ever touched down, I just kill the cattle
for what that's correct. When you touchdowns below. We killed
the trottle here.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
So we finally got it down and now I can
tax it off the runway.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
Named Devil Whiskey. When you're ready, you can go to
ground frequency one two one point nine and that's.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Work one two one point nine. Thank you. And I'm
sitting there and my headsets moving back and forth. So
I tell the controller, the ground controller who I'm talking to, now, look,
can you have those airliners move or can I turn
sideways or something? Because they're they're prop blasted or jet
(23:57):
blast is blowing my headset back here. He said, no,
you're fine, just stay right where you're at. What I
didn't realize I had a double inch, double pain insulated
windshield in front of me. That wasn't a yet blast.
It was coming through that windshield blowing my headset. It
was my pulse beating so hard it was actually literally
moving my headset back and forth. So one of the
(24:18):
mts or one of the firemen gets out in front
of the King air and he starts giving a signal
across his neck. You know, cut the engines. Cut the engines. Okay,
I get it, but guess what, I don't know how
to cut the engines off. So I said, we just
went through all this thing for forty five or fifty minutes.
Now I'm going to cut somebody's head off. So one
(24:39):
of the airline pilots that was waiting to take off
was listening to all this. He came on the radio
with the controller and volunteered. He said, look, I've got
a lot of time in the king here. I can
help him turn those engines off if you want me to.
And he says, yeah, go ahead. So he walked me
through how to turn the engines off. I just started
a fuel and we got the door open, and EMT's
(25:01):
came in and got Joe and took him off, started
working on him. But when I came I remember I
told you I came through those clouds on the way
up because it's so bumpy. Well, when I was at
altitude out over the Gulf of Mexico and I finally
got turned around heading towards land, you know I'm eleven
twelve thousand feet high. I've got to come back down
(25:23):
to land. Obviously in that part of the state, that
part of the country's at sea level. Well, when I
come back down, I did not come back down through
any clouds, because if I would have, i'd have been
a duster because that's instrument flying conditions. You can't see
inside of a cloud, so you have to do everything
by instruments, and which would have been, you know, way
(25:43):
out of my leg. But when I started coming back down,
the clouds were not off there. We just gone through
them thirty minutes ago, and when I started to descnth
they disappeared. And we're on final approach in Florida at
the beach in April, in the middle afternoon, and there's
no win none a matter of fact. Brian Nortony says,
(26:06):
Win's virtually calm because I ask him two or three
times about to win, because been a regular win, I
mean I wouldn't even hit the concrete. And Dan five
yoh's talking to Carry up in Connecticut and he says
they're down, buddy, I'll call you back and he hangs up. Well,
that leaves carrying a lurch up in Connecticut. Because when
(26:26):
you're dealing with an airplane, somebody says they're down, that
could mean two or three different thoughts.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And we're listening to Doug Waite, He's just successfully landed
a King Air and by the way his family was
on the plane, and all of us listening to this
kept wondering to ourselves, could we have done this? Something
tells me, when you're the dad and you got to
bring it home, you bring it home. And something kicked in,
some gear kicked in where he knew he.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Had to do it.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Doug
Waite's story. The movie is On a Wing and a Prayer.
Dennis Quaid plays Doug White. When we come back more
of the real life Doug White with the rest of
this story. Here on our American stories, and we return
(27:38):
to our American stories and to Doug White, whose stories
spawned the Hollywood motion picture On a Wing and a
Prayer starring Dennis Quaid. We will also be listening to
Doug after receiving an Archie League Medal of Safety Award.
The Archie League Award is considered to be the highest
honor in the air traffic control profession. Here's Doug picking
(27:59):
up the story of the chain of King Air airplane
experts helping Doug control and land after his pilot unexpectedly died.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
And Dan five yo is talking to carry up in
Connecticut and he says they're down, buddy, I'll call you back,
and he hangs up. Well, that leaves Carrying alert up
in Connecticut, because when you're dealing with an airplane, somebody
says they're down, that could mean two or three different thoughts. Well,
when it's over with, Dan gets ready to call Carry
(28:32):
back and his cell phones did. I don't mean he
had to go charge his battery up or get a
new battery. He had to get a new cell phone.
But he didn't even know Carry's phone number, and Brian Norton,
sitting beside him, didn't even know Carrie's name. But Dan's
cell phone stayed charged up just long enough for Carrie
(28:54):
to help us get down land safely. And there's no
win and the clouds disappeared. But I know who's to
control of the weather, and I know who was in
control of that whole event. I know God's not done
with us yet. The American people buying large are very
(29:18):
resourceful people. The great majority of people in this country
have a lot of individual initiative. There are exceptions. We
know who they are because our taxpayer dollars help them
be that way. But over the years, the American people
have seen problems, and they've seen issues and we've worked
(29:39):
ourselves around them, over them. We've been venting things to
make our life easier and fixed stuff. We've invented things
like well they airplane for instance, because you know, help
us get around better, and cars and telephones and televisions
and whatnot, because we have initiative. But there's one thing
that I found in my lifetime that will knock down
(30:02):
the resourcefulness of an individual quickly. It will absolutely bury
individual initiatives every time, and that is bureaucracy of any sort.
You see, bureaucrats think they're smarter than us regular joes.
(30:22):
Bureaucrats see a problem like y'all do, and they have
to form a committee to figure out what to do.
A month down the road, the problem is still there,
and they've got to form another committee to oversee the
first committee and the problem is still there. Then they've
got to pass the resolution to give themselves permission to
study the problem that they got there with the first place,
(30:43):
and then they have to have quorums. It takes bureaucrats
an hour and a half to watch sixty minutes. But
this bunch on Easter Sunday, these folks had a problem
that they faced on that day, and they didn't form
(31:04):
a committee to figure out what to do. They just
got it done. They didn't pass a resolution because that's
where they are. You can't train for this people. I
guarantee you in your OPS manual. Sounds fancy. I assume
(31:25):
you've got something like an OPS manuel. It doesn't say
when King air pilot dies. Go down to another sector.
Get a woman who has some piloting experience, bring her
up here, sit her down beside you, and while you're
working all these airliners full of hundreds of people. When
(31:47):
she gets enough, make a signal to let her working
and let convince them to take care of take the
autopilot off. If that doesn't work, go to subsection B.
Get on a cell phone, call a buddy lives one
thousand miles from here that has King hair experience, and
(32:08):
talk ten on a cell phone that is not there.
It's individual initiative that gets it done. Those are some
of the divine things fell into place. So fast forward
(32:32):
to now, well back it up four or five years ago.
Brian Eggiston E G. E.
Speaker 5 (32:40):
S T.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
A Win. He used to he was a writer. He
used to write for the Tyler Perry Show. But he's
was wanting to learn how to fly, so he took
two or three hours of flying lessons and they said, well,
you don't need to fly in more for a while.
You need to learn how to talk on the radio first,
and then we'll get back in there. So he's in
(33:00):
the room over there in the land and doing his
flight training and they put air traffic Control conversation on.
He's got to listen to it, listen to how the
lingo is and how they talk and all that, and
what he ends up listening to is the actual forty
five minute recording of our incident. And that enthralled him
so much that he made an effort to try to
(33:22):
get a hold of me. Well, he went to the
old standard route of trying to find me. He found
me through one of my kids on Facebook. He said,
are you the one you and your dad and mama
were on the airplane that the pilot passed away and
londy dotty dotty and yes, sir, would you give me
your dad's mailing address? So Brian sent me a real
nice letter about five years ago, told me who he was,
(33:45):
said he's a screenwriter. I said he was a fledgling pilot,
and he was a Christian, and he wanted to know
if I cared if he wrote a screenplay about the event.
I said, no, I don't care. And by the way,
that air traffic control tape, that recording of forty something
minutes is used today and has been used for several
(34:06):
years now in training by the FAA when they're training
new controllers and also when they're recertified him. It's training
them what to do and what not to do in
an emergency situation like that. So Brian, I said, yeah,
that'd be fine. I don't care. So he said, would
you mind if I come to your house interview? And
I said no, I don't care about that either. So
he loaded up. He drove to Archi of all louis
(34:27):
In and he's pickup truck, and he spent about three
days with us, and he had his tape recorder and
he'd asked me a question. Sometimes he'd pushed record and
he wouldn't say anything for two hours, and he just
recorded everything. I took in my little golf course and
took him to our little church and fed him and
all that, and we ended up being real close. We
(34:49):
talked about a few things we'd like to have in
the film, and a few things we didn't need in
the film. We're all agreed with that. And he went
back and got busy. In six weeks or so long,
he sent me a script. It was called Flying by
Faith was the title he put on. And I liked it.
I said, let's go with it. So he spent the
(35:09):
last four or five years trying to sell that, and
he'd just get pretty close with one of the studios
and the guy would retire, or he'd get fired, or
he change jobs or something, so we have to start
all over again. As a matter of fact, MGM turned
it down two or three years ago. Well, then they
got across on Roma down his desk. Roma and her husband,
(35:30):
Mark Burnett run the faith based section of MGM called
Light Workers, and she fell in love with the script
and she went home. She told Mark, she said, you
need to read this, and she said, Mark Burnett has
never read a script, can't stand to read a movie script.
But he read this one and he fell in love
with it. And they picked it back up and they
(35:50):
made the film as MGM, even though they turned it
down a couple of years, a different department of MGM
and turned it down a couple of years previous. In
the meantime, she gets ahold of Dennis Quaid. He was
working on another project with her. She said, Dennis, I
think you'd be perfect to play Doug White in this film.
He said, you're a pilot, you're from the South, et cetera.
(36:13):
She said, what, yeah, let me read it. So we
came back. He said, I'd love to do that film.
So they got Dennis Quaid on board, and in the meantime,
Amazon has since bought MGM, so Jeff Bezos and Amazon
owns MGM now and they we're gonna release this film
last August or so, but they got moved up. And
(36:36):
I think by divine intervention it's a lot better idea anyway.
And it's gonna be released on Easter weekend this year
under the name of On a Wing and a Prayer.
MGM changed it to the title of On a Wing
and a Prayer, So that's gonna be released on Good Friday,
which is April seventh, twenty three this year. Because the
whole incident originally took place on Easter Sunday and the
(36:59):
papers and South Florida called it the East America. So
fourteen years after the fact, we're still here, got three
granddaughters later, and the movie's coming out, and we hope
it is a home run for the studios, and we
hope it's a home run for the church throughout the world,
(37:19):
and we hope it's a home run for Brian Naguson's
professional career. I'm hoping it does real well for Amazon.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Thank you for listening, and a terrific job on the
production editing and storytelling by our own Greg Angler, and
a special thanks to Doug Waite for sharing his story.
The movie based on this story on a Wing and
a Prayer with Dennis Quaid playing Doug Waite, and my goodness,
what an authentic voice and what an authentic sounding solution
(37:48):
to a problem. And we know what he's talking about
when he talks about how Americans can just well get
things done. And we all know what bureaucracies look and
feel like in the public and the private sector, and
it's not pleasant. Heck, what's the theories the office about,
if anything, but how silly and goofy working in large
bureaucracies can be and what they can feel like. Doug
(38:11):
White's story here on our American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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