Relaxing day at the beach, turns into horrific death
 

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/1...ills_beachgoer

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. - The kit-built single-engine plane had turned into a glider, almost silently trying to make an emergency landing along a stretch of beach. Pharmaceutical salesman Robert Gary Jones, ear buds in, listening to his iPod while jogging neither saw nor heard it and was struck from behind Monday evening and killed instantly.


"There's no noise," said aviation expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the National Transportation Safety Board. "So the jogger, with his ear buds in, and the plane without an engine, you're basically a stealth aircraft. Who would expect to look up?"


The 38-year-old Jones, whose mother said he was serious about nutrition and exercise, especially jogging, was on a business trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for GlaxoSmithKline. He was looking forward to getting home to the northern Atlanta suburb of Woodfield, Georgia, for his daughter's third birthday Wednesday, Pauline Jones said.


"I was never so shocked in all my life," she said of learning the news, her voice shaking. "They say that God only gives you what you can handle. I said, 'You know what, I've reached my max."'


The pilot, Edward I. Smith of Chesapeake, Virginia, and his lone passenger walked away from the crash landing near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa. The Beaufort County Sheriff's Office named the passenger as David Henry, 59, also of Chesapeake, The Island Packet newspaper reported.


Smith was on the beach Tuesday, when the four-seater aircraft was hoisted onto a trailer hitched to a pickup truck and towed away.


"I've got a lot of issues going on right now," Smith said. "I've got a plane that's all torn up. And I've got a young man that I killed."


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The guy certainly knows his priorities.. my planes all fucked up , oh and that guy i killed.

That was my first thought after reading that quote.

I've never flown a plane, but if my breaks went out in my car and I had an option of going into a brick wall or taking out an innocent person on the side of the road, I'd take my chances with the brick wall. I don't think I could live with myself if I were him.

The following clears it all up ..... "lost propeller" "built from a kit"


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well granted his windshield was covered in oil, maybe he didn't see the guy, but considering his first statement was he was worried about the plane , then the guy , that was probably the same priorities when he was landing it.

Yeah, her boyfriend just died. Dude died in a hang-gliding accident! What an idiot!
[sarcastically imitating dead boyfriend]

"Aaaahhh, I'm hang-gliding! Take a good picture, honey, I'm dead!"

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On a sad note sucks about the guy who died...

I didn't read the whole story, just the copypasta. Just read it. If the guy didn't see the jogger I can't fault him for it, but he certainly shouldn't put his kit craft infront of the death of a human being when discussing the shit he's got to deal with.

The victim's mom lives in my town. Got to feel for her. :(

Its like a scene from Final destination almost ... so surreal..

Terrible story. Tragic death.

It wasn't as if he were asked "which thing is worse". Sometimes things come out wrong. It reads to me like someone who is sick of saying "no comment" to a reporter when he's trying to clean up a mess, probably (almost certainly) at the behest of the local police. Mistake may have been saying anything other than no comment.

Well if we're on the topic of God then "it was God's will"
Phew, that makes it easy/better.

It's hard to judge a person from one sentence taken right after such a traumatic tragedy. I'd like to think that he didn't say that in the order of importance to him and it came out more like a timeline instead.

It's sad that something like that will go viral around the world and this guy will be forever known as the guy that cared more about his plane than a human life. I'm not stupid enough to believe that.

freak accident, what are the odds..

1 in 37,485,967,995,958,391.003747748939395

(i stayed at a holiday inn last night)










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