The Oaks Rural Fire Brigade
- From an early age, Jake Elven, 29, from Sydney, NSW, was keen to learn how to fly a plane.
- So in March 2023, he got behind the controls on his second lesson as a student pilot.
- After a steady take off, Jake was soaring through the skies when everything went terribly wrong.
Here Jake tells his story in his own words
Taking a seat in the cockpit of the tiny two-seater ultra-light Jabiru aircraft, I held tightly to the controls.
It was March 2023, and I was having my second lesson as a student pilot.
Growing up, I’d always been obsessed with things that had a motor.
I drove boats, raced cars and motocross bikes.
The only things with engines I hadn’t conquered were those that were airborne.
‘The engine’s going to fail.’
Now, after a steady take off, I was soaring through the sunny skies over Sydney.
With my instructor next to me having his own set of controls, I practised descending.
Marvelling at the views beneath us, I loved feeling the wind beneath my wings.
But around 20 minutes later, the plane began vibrating and an unnerving humming buzzed from the engine.
Having raced cars and motorbikes, it was a sound I’d heard before when a vehicle experiences a loss of engine power.
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‘The engine’s going to fail,’ I warned.
‘Don’t panic. Head back to the runway,’ my instructor advised.
I did what he said, but I could feel us losing speed as we neared the tarmac.
Despite being at full throttle, it wasn’t enough to get us there. Then, the engine stalled.
The propeller ground to a halt and the eerie silence that followed seemed to last an eternity.
‘We’re going down.’
‘We’re going down,’ I yelled.
Spotting some bushland, I decided it was the best place to try and crash land, hoping it’d cushion our fall.
My instructor took over the controls and frantically tried to restart the plane.
With us teetering 30 metres above the tree line, a crosswind caused the plane to lurch violently to one side.
As we fell out of the sky at a 45-degree angle, a tree ripped off the plane’s tail, spinning us upside down as we hurtled towards the ground.
This is going to hurt, I thought, bracing myself for the impact.
Plunging into the dense scrub, we hit a huge tree with an almighty crash, and our heads whacked against the front windscreen, smashing it to smithereens.
Then everything went black…
When I came to, I was hanging upside down in my seat.
I’m alive! I thought, but I need to get out!
‘This is going to hurt.’
Unbuckling my seatbelt, I clambered through the front window. Peering down at my legs, I saw blood gushing from my shins, and I had a gaping hole in my right ankle, so deep it exposed the bone.
My instructor! I fretted.
As he dipped in and out of consciousness, I managed to unbuckle his seatbelt and pull him from the wreckage out of his side window.
His body was covered in blood, flaps of flesh hung from his arms and legs and his left hand was completely mangled.
Using my jumper to stem the blood flow, I dragged him towards the airfield 100 metres away.
Then I heard a car engine.
The instructor’s wife, who’d been watching from the airstrip and seen the horror unfold, was hurtling towards us.
‘I’ve called an ambulance,’ she said. ‘But help is 45 minutes away!’
I told her to take her husband in her two-seater car, as he was in worse shape than me.
Alone among the debris, everything hit me.
‘I’m alive!’
I’ve just fallen out of the sky and survived, I thought. No-one is going to believe me.
So I filmed the scene of the wreckage on my phone, before uploading it to social media.
As I hobbled back towards my car, adrenalin and shock surged through my body.
With emergency services still ages away, I decided to drive myself to hospital.
Tying a shoelace around my calf to stop further blood loss from my ankle, I made the 90-minute trip to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
By the time I got there, I felt woozy, and my entire body started to tingle.
Rushed straight into the operating theatre, I came to several hours later.
‘You suffered deep lacerations to your head, chest and shins that required stitches,’ a doctor told me. ‘And we had to rebuild your ankle with plates, rods and bolts to reposition and repair it.’
I’d also fractured my right femur and was in a full leg brace.
I faced a long road to recovery and extensive physio and rehab.
‘Can’t believe how lucky you are,’ friends said of my extreme tale of survival.
I was discharged five days later, but needed time off work as a business owner to recover.
That’s when I found the love of my life, Emma, 28.
We met through a dating app, and last month I popped the question over a romantic picnic on a secluded Sydney beach.
Emma is 100 per cent supportive of my mission to eventually get my pilot’s licence.
While I’ve flown commercially since without any fear, I haven’t had another lesson.
But that’s just because I’ve been short on time.
‘I’ll back you in everything you do, so long as you’re safe and take precautions,’ Emma says.
My instructor spent an extensive time in hospital due to his injuries, and there is currently an investigation underway as to how and why the aircraft malfunctioned.
More than two years on from the accident, my body has healed but the scars remain.
While most people would rather keep their feet firmly on the ground if they’d been through such an ordeal, I still love flying.
I’ve survived against the odds and figure the chances of being in another crash are low.
I can’t wait to feel the wind beneath the wings again.
What is the likelihood of surviving a plane crash?
The likelihood of surviving a plane crash is high—over 95% of passengers in U.S. airline accidents survive, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Most crashes are not fatal and involve controlled emergency landings.
What is the #1 reason for plane crashes?
Pilot error is the leading cause of plane crashes, accounting for over 50% of incidents. Contributing factors may include misjudgement, poor communication, or misinterpretation of instruments or weather conditions.
What is the safest seat on a plane in a crash?
Studies show that middle seats in the rear third of the plane have the highest survival rates. A 2015 TIME analysis found those seats had a 28% fatality rate versus 44% for front-row seats.
While no seat is guaranteed to be safe in the event of a crash, rear cabin sections generally show higher survival rates in crash investigations.
How many planes crash a year?
Globally, there are about 10–20 serious plane crashes involving commercial aircraft each year. Fatal accidents are even rarer, especially among major airlines, making air travel one of the safest modes of transportation.
