Posted on 10/07/2011 3:06:48 PM PDT by Hunton Peck
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The former astronaut at the center of a love triangle that featured a bizarre airport assault by his former astronaut girlfriend on his new love interest was the pilot who survived a small plane crash last month in rural Alaska, federal officials said Friday.
Bill Oefelein piloted the shuttle Discovery in December 2006. Two months later, his former girlfriend, Lisa Nowak, raced the 900 miles from Houston to the Orlando airport to confront Colleen Shipman, wearing an astronaut diaper so that she wouldn't have to stop and she donned a wig and trench coat as Shipman looked for her bags, police have said. Nowak was banished from NASA.
Oefelein and Shipman are now married and living in Anchorage, according to Florida attorney Kepler Funk, who has represented Shipman in the past.
In the Sept. 15 crash, Oefelein managed to skillfully steer the stalled small floatplane into some alder bushes and land without any injuries near Judd Lake, about 50 miles northwest of Anchorage. None of the three on board was injured, but the six-seat Regal Air plane was heavily damaged when it went down in a swampy area of alder bushes about 200 feet from the lake.
(Excerpt) Read more at centurylink.net ...
This guy is a real drama
...soon to be a Lifetime movie.
I wonder if he was wearing a dress with a giant chicken head while on the flight.
The company has no accidents in nearly 30 years and then hire an ex-astronaut for a part-time job who promptly is in a wreck that nearly kills their passengers.
Stall on takeoff, very little altitude, minimal airspeed or less, heavy damage, everyone walked away.
It sounds like they hired the right guy to handle this 30 year event.
Or maybe they hired the wrong person. Can’t say one way or the other until the cause is understood. Just sucks to have a 30 year no-accident history ruined.
You can't really learn anything by reading a media account of an aircraft mishap other than there was a crash. From the initial NTSB report it sounds like the engine lost power. There could be a lot of causes for that.
He can land a space shuttle dead-stick from low Earth orbit, but he prangs a single engine float plane.
Stuff happens. What a pilot did years ago doesn’t bear any relationship to whatever happened on this flight or in flight preparation.
“You can’t really learn anything by reading a media account of an aircraft mishap other than there was a crash.”
Agreed, and my post did not speculate on the cause of the engine failure. The craft may not have stalled and the engine may have provided enough power to assist in selecting an off-lake landing location.
Nonetheless, we can with some degree of certainty conclude from the media account that the pilot did not have a lot of time or altitude and had at best minimal effective airspeed given that he landed only 200 feet beyond the lake.
Obviously, I should have carved out an exception for pilot error with my endorsement of the pilot.
true. I was hoping the rest of the story was that HE was wearing a wig and a diaper and trying to fly to re-unite with the crazy lady.
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