Obsidian/00.03 News/'Not today' The twin miracles of Palm Beach - The Sunday Long Read.md

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# 'Not today': The twin miracles of Palm Beach - The Sunday Long Read

#### The pilot went unconscious at 10,000 feet. Neither of the passengers had ever flown a plane. For them to survive, it would take a miracle. Or two.

Shortly before noon on May 10, 2022, the Cessna Caravan, bound from Marsh Harbor in the Bahamas to Fort Pierce, Fla., was cruising comfortably at 12,000 feet. The plane’s airspeed was good—180 knots—and Fort Pierce was just 30 minutes away.

The weather that morning was spectacular—so clear, crisp and sun drenched that Ken Allen, the 64-year-old pilot, took out his phone to record video from the cockpit window. All these years on, being airborne over the Atlantic could still take his breath away.

There were two others aboard the turbo prop aircraft, a model of plane known for its rugged durability and one that could hold as many as 14 passengers at maximum capacity.

“The Caravan aircraft,” reads its online promotional material, “delivers the rare combination of high performance, low operating costs and ability to adapt to a wide variety of missions.”

Russ Franck, Allen’s lifelong pal along for the picturesque flight, sat in the other cockpit seat. Franck was not a pilot himself, and over the years had declined Allen’s occasional offers to briefly take control when he was flying in Allen’s much smaller private plane. He’d only been in the Caravan once before, and so he was good company, not much more.

That said, Franck had complete trust in Allen. His friend was careful, organized, meticulous, the obsessive, protective sort who insisted absolutely no one but he wash his car.

“The kind of guy you want to be your pilot,” Franck said.

Darren Harrison was the other passenger, seated in the second row of seats on the right side of the plane. Allen had been enlisted to fly Harrison and others down to Marsh Harbor and back to do some sport fishing. Harrison had caught a couple of fishdolphins, but none of the Blue Marlins he was hoping for.

Harrison that morning was also taking pictures with his phone, though not of the view out the cockpit. He was taking shots of the inside of the plane. He wanted his pregnant wife Brittny to be reassured the plane was big and comfortable, safe for her to fly in. Maybe they’d work in an adventure in the three months left before the baby was due. In a fishing shirt and shorts, Harrison took a photo of his feet in flip flops propped on the facing, spacious seat in front of him.

There was good reason for Brittny to be anxious about taking risks. She and Darren had struggled for a long time to get pregnant after their wedding in 2018. An initial round of in vitro fertilization efforts had failed, too. But the second swing at in vitro, as Darren liked to say, produced a home run, a healthy, developing girl. Brittny wasn’t interested in taking unnecessary chances.

Harrison, then, had not told Brittny about a brief hiccup that had happened on the flight to Marsh Harbor days earlier. There were half a dozen folks on the plane that Thursday—Harrison, Allen, as well as Harrison’s friend Philip Weikert and his wife and child. 

Weikert was the plane’s owner—his grandfather had been General Douglas MacArthur’s personal pilot—and would be fishing along with Harrison. Weikert was a licensed private pilot, but only what’s called “instrument rated,” and he was always looking to get more flight hours under his belt. Allen, serving as instructor, was overseeing Weikert’s approach for landing at Marsh Harbor.

Allen had to caution Weikert. The plane was coming in hot.

“Watch your air speed, Philip,” Allen said into his headset.

Harrison, who had never flown himself, or been very intrigued about trying, liked to wear one of the extra headsets during flights. He got a kick out of listening to the chatter.

“Hey, stupid question,” Harrison said through his headset. “We’re in a fucking airplane. Why do we need to watch our speed? There’s no damn cops.”

Air speed, of course, was everything in flying‚—making it both possible in the first place, and often dangerous in the end. Fly too slow, and you risked stalling, and falling out of the sky. Flying too fast carried its own deadly perils.

“What’s the worst that can happen if you go too fast?” Harrison again pressed Allen.

“We rip our wings off,” Allen answered, “and we are a lawn dart.”

Lawn dart? Harrison said to himself. Oh, right.

On May 10, at 11:48 a.m. on a safe and gorgeous day to fly, the Cessna Caravan, Flight No. N333LD, was directed to drop from 12,000 feet to 10,000. The Florida coastline would be coming up soon.

![](https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Cessna.208b.n208nj.arp_.jpg?resize=1024%2C658&ssl=1)

A Cessa Caravan 208 (Public domain image)

---

## **“Do your homework”**

Bobby Morgan, a veteran air traffic controller at Palm Beach International Airport, was not supposed to work on Tuesday May 10. But a colleague had called Monday night. His kid was sick. Could Morgan take his shift the next day? 

Sure, Morgan said. It meant overtime pay for him.

And so Morgan reported the next morning for his eight-hour tour—7:30 a.m. to 3:30 in the afternoon. He read the weather reports, which called for clear skies. There were, however, gusty winds, approaching 30 miles per hour, and as a result the airport’s runways had been set up so that planes would land or take off going from west to east.

Morgan, who was 20 before he ever traveled on a commercial airliner, loved being in the air and as a young man got his pilot’s license and a degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, graduating in 2001, just months before 9/11. The terrorist attacks convulsed the airline industry, and pilot jobs would prove hard to come by. Morgan began to consider work as an air traffic controller, a job he’d once promised himself he’d never do. He was stocking shelves at a Publix supermarket, after all, no time for being terribly picky.

The working conditions for air traffic controllers were notoriously fraught and unrelenting:staring at radar screens in small, dark rooms, the everyday stakes literally life and death. Of course, there were satisfactions, too—maintaining order, keeping people safe.

“The pilots are the drivers,” Morgan was fond of saying. “We’re the cops.”

If his dreams of becoming a commercial pilot were dashed by 9/11, Morgan nonetheless was determined to fly. He got his license, and was in the air as often as he could be.

“It’s like a runner’s high,” he said of the rush of flying. “The only thing that stops you is money.”

In his first months as an air traffic controller, Morgan was sent to Greensboro, N.C., the aim being to get his legs under him at a smaller airport. One day early on, he also got an introduction to the limits of the job.

A family of three in a private plane was struggling to land in heavy cloud cover. Officials at the airport knew Morgan was a pilot. They thought he might be able to coach the family down. The autopilot on the plane had failed, and the father at the controls was just not capable of flying in the dense clouds. There were clouds as low as 200 feet, circumstances that would have challenged the most seasoned pilots. Morgan couldn’t help much. The plane ran out of gas and crashed.

“They’re yelling as they’re going down,” Morgan recalled of the family.

No one survived.

Morgan later on got certified as an instructor, paid to teach others how to conquer both fear and cockiness. Inexperienced pilots, he said, tend to rush—failing to check the weather or if an airport’s runways are closed. He said they often “like to kick the tires, jump in and go.”

And so to those he was teaching, Morgan would preach his simple gospel: “Do your homework, don’t take chances, be conservative.”

It wasn’t a bad blueprint for work as an air traffic controller. Not that it had ever fully settled Morgan’s daily dose of nerves.

“You always feel like you’re missing something,” Morgan confessed. “If I put somebody out on the runway, I’m just always looking around. Is somebody going to land on top of this plane?”

It might surprise or even frighten some people, he said, but air traffic controllers make mistakes all the time.

“Even the best,” he said. 

By 11:30 a.m. on May 10, Morgan was four hours into his shift, halfway through a day he had not expected to work. The routine at Palm Beach International was to work an hour, then get a half hour break. There was a courtyard outside the control room. It was called “the prison yard,” but in truth, there were patio chairs, even a hammock. It was comfortable enough. Morgan took a seat, kicked his shoes off, and cracked open a book: a Federal Aviation Administration handbook on flying float planes, aircraft capable of landing on water.

“Do your homework.”

Morgan’s first article of faith.

---

## **“I ain’t dying today”**

Ken Allen, who lived in Lake Wales, Fla., was flying the Cessna Caravan first to Fort Pierce because everyone had to clear customs before heading home. He and Franck would fly the rest of the way to Lake Wales; Darren would be off to his home in Lakeland, armed with his photos of the plane’s interior.

Allen had been flying for more than three decades, and he’d always been happy—sometimes for free, sometimes for a modest fee—to shuttle people up and down the state and to the Caribbean, folks looking to hunt, fish, vacation, get to a business meeting. He owned a couple of planes himself, and he and his wife of 32 years would make their own share of trips—to her family in Alabama or to their vacation home in the Florida Keys, a six-hour trip in the car cut to 90 minutes in the air.

Allen was a Florida boy through and through. His parents, high school sweethearts, had worked together at Weeki Wachee Springs, one of Florida’s earliest tourist attractions, his mother one of the performing mermaids. His dad wound up in the oil business, and Allen would follow him, though it was not a straight route. He’d first spend seven years as a paramedic, responding to fires and accidents, delivering babies, saving lives, and, once, standing silently over the ruins of a small plane crash.

“You see a lot of people at their worst: suicides, drownings, a fender bender that snaps someone’s neck,” he said. “But you also find out real quick how tough the human body is. I’ve seen people be in motorcycle or other wrecks that you would not think they could survive. And yet they walk away.”

Allen, who did not start flying until he was in his late 20s, had managed to keep himself safe in the air. Controlling the plane had come instinctively; what his early training had provided most importantly was “what not to do to get yourself in trouble.”

Not that he’d dodged trouble altogether. Once, flying with his wife, the fuel pump failed, and Allen had to navigate his way 200 miles to safety. His closest brush with true disaster involved a landing when his engine failed and he barely avoided, well, becoming a lawn dart.

“Rolled to a stop and sat there for about five minutes, hands shaking,” he remembered of his landing. “It scared me to death.”

By 11:50 on May 10, Allen had completed his descent to 10,000 feet. Minutes later, at 11:58, Allen suddenly told the others he didn’t feel great. He reached for his breakfast bar and a drink. Maybe he was dehydrated.

Franck doubted Allen was making a joke. When he saw Allen’s forced, seemingly frozen half smile, he knew he wasn’t. Panicked, Franck managed to say, “Stay with us, Ken.”

Harrison, though, concluded Allen “was already out—gone.”

Allen, in slumping to his left, inadvertently turned off the autopilot switch.

“This ain’t fixing to be good,” Harrison thought to himself.

Then another thought… “Not today. I ain’t dying today.”

With that, Harrison, having kicked off his flip flops, was out of his seat and scrambling barefoot toward the cockpit.

The plane had gone into a steep righthand dive. The Cessna Caravan’s maximum speed was 190 knots. Anything faster could result in structural damage, and with it, catastrophe.

Falling hundreds of feet a second, the Cessna’s speed hit 295 knots.

Harrison could feel the force of the dive on his face—it seemed as if it was blowing his cheeks back. When he reached Allen, he looked out the cockpit windshield. All he saw was water.

Allen was not slumped forward, but to the side. From behind the pilot’s seat, Harrison reached over and grabbed the yoke. Franck had a yoke in front of him in the right cockpit seat, and he grabbed it.

Harrison could be good in a crisis. He’d been in a car with his parents, returning from closing on his first home, when they came upon a man on the side of the road trapped underneath a Dixie Chopper commercial mower. Harrison’s father had just had surgery, and so he would be of little help. Harrison and his mother wound up rescuing the man, managing to lift the mower off him. A Life Flight helicopter took the man to the hospital, and he survived.

Harrison, who spent much of his boyhood on a four-wheeler, would prove good at working with machines. He handled all the repair work for the equipment in his first company—a lawn care outfit. And he was adept with the hand tools needed to lay floor when he went to work for his dad’s home interior company.

“My dad would always kid me, tell me I could literally jump on any piece of equipment and figure it out,” he said. “And I was like, I mean, it’s not that hard. It’s just a couple of fucking controls and a steering wheel and gas pedal. The mentality I’ve always had is that everything operates the same.”

Now, reaching over a potentially dead man, and speeding to a crash in the ocean, Harrison did what he could. He remembered Allen’s talk of wings breaking off. He actually wasn’t sure the plane’s wings were still on. But if he had any hope, he quickly calculated, he’d have to pull the plane out of its dive slowly—level off, or come close.

“Flatten out,” he said, “even if we’re still going down.”

The plane had fallen 3,500 feet, before the harrowing descent ended.

“We’re in deep shit,” Franck recalled thinking. “I’m going to have to fly this plane because I doubt if Darren knows that much about it.’

Any chance required getting Allen out of the pilot’s seat. Harrison would do it, but he needed Franck to steer the plane for as long as it took. The plane had recovered some altitude, climbing from 6,500 feet to 8,000.

Harrison told Franck to calm down, to pull himself together. We are going to be okay, he told him.

“So just get that in your head,” Harrison commanded. “I’m going to need you to help me. Can you do that?” 

“Yeah,” Franck responded. “I think I can.”

Allen was not a particularly big man, but he was, unconscious, at least 160 pounds of dead weight. Harrison managed to get Allen out of the pilot’s seat and laid him on the floor of the plane behind the cockpit. The front of Allen’s shirt had ripped open, and Harrison was startled by what he saw: a black and blue blot the size of a softball on Allen’s chest. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it scared the hell out of him.

“I thought his heart might have exploded,” Harrison said. 

Once in the pilot’s seat, not much seemed to go right,. Harrison didn’t know what button to push to talk into the headset. Franck showed him, but the headset still didn’t work. In moving Allen, the pilot’s headset had been torn from the outlet, shredding the plug. Two of the three digital dashboard screens had gone black.

![](https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image2.jpeg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1)

The digital dashboard of the Cessna Caravan.

Harrison had managed to put on another headset, but Franck had to move the mouthpiece into place from the top of Harrison’s head.

At one point, Harrison reached over and gently pulled Franck’s hands from the right hand yoke. The two men, in trying to pull the plane out of the dive, were fighting each other.

Harrison dismissed any notion of trying to fly back to Marsh Harbor. On the longshot chance Allen’s life could be saved, Harrison guessed, he stood a better chance at a Florida hospital. 

Florida, of course, was to the west. But which way was that? Not that he knew it, but the plane had come out of its dive flying south, away from Ft. Pierce.

Harrison’s racing mind lit up with a memory. Harrison had always been struck by the fact that even in the 21st Century—with all its advanced planes and sophisticated equipment—you could always find a basic compass on an airplane. He’d even see them in the cabins of commercial airlines.

“I always laughed,” he said, “with all the electronics that are on that thing, why do you have a compass?”

Harrison looked around the cockpit, and there it was amid all the other gauges and meters and gadgets in the front of the plane. He turned the plane right, and flew west.

It was 12:01 p.m., three minutes since Allen had gone unconscious.

Trying to reach the Florida coast, Harrison flew for 12 minutes. Even with working headsets, Harrison and Franck struggled to figure out channels or frequencies to talk on. At last Harrison managed to connect with controllers at Fort Pierce. 

He gave them the basics: the pilot was out; he didn’t know how to fly. Harrison was soon turned over to controllers at Palm Beach International.

The plane had climbed as high as 9,500 feet, nearly the altitude it had been at prior to the harrowing dive, and reached 187 knots, very close to the maximum safe speed.

 At 12:12, now flying at 7,500 feet, the plane was 15 miles from the coast when Franck was able to make out the coastline. Harrison did, too.

 “I could see it plain as day,” Harrison said. “It was a clear day, thank God.”

 The relief was brief.

“It sank in,” Harrison said. “At some point, you’re going to have to land this fucking thing.”

No passenger has ever landed a commercial airliner in cases where the pilot or flight crew have become ill or incapable of flying. In 2005, a flight attendant who had been a student pilot tried to land a Helios Airways 737 after the entire flight crew had become incapacitated. The plane ran out of fuel and all 121 aboard died when it crashed in Greece.

With smaller planes, there have been a handful of episodes that did not turn tragic. Max Sylvester, a flight student in Australia, landed a two-seat Cessna during his very first lesson after the pilot instructor next to him fell ill. Sylvester first called his girlfriend, then had to hold the pilot’s head up so he would not choke on the blood suddenly coming from his mouth, and after four practice tries, he landed the plane safely.

“I hope they don’t think I’m paying for this class,” he joked with the air traffic controller.

Six years earlier, in 2013, John Wildey, 65, was the passenger in a two-seat plane that took off in Northeast, England. The pilot, a close friend, said he didn’t feel well.

“His head fell back like he was looking at the ceiling,” Wildey recalled at the time. “His eyes were open, he had no pulse, and he was a bit clammy on the face when I tried to touch him. I recognized straight away that he was dead.”

Wildey put the plane down successfully as night fell after a helicopter had been put in the air to help guide him.

“Afterwards I bought a log book and put an hour and ten minutes in it,” he wrote in a first-person account. “I did my first solo, first formation flying, and first night landing all on my first trip. Not a bad start.”

Patrick Smith, the respected aviation expert and author who has run the AskThePilot website for years, said there is of course no real formula for survival in such moments, but three things help make success possible:

A passenger with an instinctive knack for keeping the plane level, for not making the understandable, even irresistible mistake of over controlling; good weather; and somebody who can talk you down.

Oh, Smith added, there’s a fourth.

“Luck.”

---

## **“You have to be fast”**

There were 16 people in the house in Delray Beach, Fla., where Nishant Patel was raised. His Indian family—his father, his father’s three brothers and the men’s four wives—had moved there from England. The brothers had lost their father when they were young, and with him went any aspirations for higher education or advanced degrees. 

If they were going to make it, the brothers would stick together. They would be self-starters, entrepreneurs in their minds. Mom and pop convenience stores would be the gateway businesses, and South Florida seemed like a dream place to make a go of it.

“Just grunt work. Work hard to get where you want to go,” Patel said of his family.

The 16 folks under one roof included a grandmother and seven kids.

“It was chaotic. You didn’t have much privacy,” Patel said. “But there was always someone around if you needed help. I felt like I had four sets of parents.”

Patel, the oldest of the seven children, pushed hard to lead the way. No one in the immigrant amalgam in Delray Beach had graduated from college.

“I like pressure,” Patel said.

And he thrived under it. He studied hard, went to Johns Hopkins, got a degree in the history of science, technology and medicine. He went on to five years of medical school at Hopkins, and emerged ready for a career as a thoracic surgeon.

Speed and precision, calm and confidence, organization and teamwork—he loved all of what heart surgery required.

“I mean, you have to be fast,” he said, “because the length of the operation is directly tied to the outcome of the patient.”

Patel’s first case without another surgeon across the operating table from him went well, although the night before had not. He didn’t sleep a second.

“Rehearsing the steps, writing them down exactly—what I’m going to say, exactly what I’m going to do, how I’m going to ask for things,” he recalled.

Years later, now with three kids of his own, Patel opted to return from Baltimore to the sprawling family brood in South Florida, taking a staff position at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center.

He was there shortly after noon on May 10, 2022, finishing up a case.

The procedure was a success. But he hadn’t slept much that night before either. It’s an exhilarating and grueling specialty.

“I always tell patients there’s only two surgeons that don’t have complications,” Patel said. “Those that don’t operate, and those who lie.”

---

## **“Idiots flying a plane”**

Bobby Morgan got the intercom page towards the end of his break in the courtyard at Palm Beach International.

“Bobby, come to the radar room immediately.” 

Morgan, shoes off, book in hand, first thought it was a prank. The staff was capable of harmless goofing off to manage the day’s stress, although it mostly happened on weekends when there were fewer supervisors. And so he put his shoes on, and was walking through the break room inside when he passed a colleague.

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” he was told.

Morgan went in. The radar room is roughly 300 square feet. There are nine radar scopes, five on one wall, four on the other. It’s kept dark, though not quite as dark as a movie theater. Can’t be bumping into things. There’s a supervisor’s desk in the center.

“Here’s the situation,” the supervisor on duty began. “There’s two passengers on board. The pilot’s incapacitated, and they can’t wake him up. He’s unresponsive and the passengers are flying the plane.”

Morgan quickly asked what kind of plane it was. The supervisor told him, and said so far the passengers had been doing okay. But since Morgan was also a pilot and flight instructor, the supervisor said, he was the best candidate to rescue them.

“We’d like you to try to help him land the plane somewhere,” the supervisor said.

Morgan’s first reaction was reluctance.

“Why does it have to be me?” he asked himself. 

There were no better options. And not a ton of luck. The only reliable way to communicate with the plane was with an emergency radio—an old-school, hand-held, walkie talkie type device attached to a wall above the radar scopes. The radio, a Motorola Pet2000,had a nickname—“the mercy radio.”

Morgan got through to Harrison. The supervisor was thrilled. Morgan was flummoxed.

“Well, I don’t know what to say,” he told the supervisor. 

Morgan made it up as he went.he first thing he relayed to Harrison was that they would try to get him to the nearest airport. It was a small facility in Boca Raton, right on the water. But Morgan had no idea if Harrison was at all familiar with Florida.

Morgan did know it was important to keep talking, to be a presence even if it was telling Harrison simple things he might have already figured out. The situation was hairy enough; loneliness would be no help. Morgan fought to limit the use of jargon, ingrained in him as it was.

He told Harrison the Boca Raton airport, seven miles off, would be seen at 11 o’clock on a clockface. The approaching landscape was full of peril: I-95, the Florida Turnpike, dense residential communities, the swamps of the Everglades. All would be miserable places to crash.

“I don’t have any instruments,” Harrison told Morgan. “Can you help me turn them back on?”

Morgan was struck by Harrison’s calm. He didn’t seem intimidated by trying to make sense of, and maybe use of, the flying tools in the plane. The problem was Morgan had never flown in a Cessna Caravan. He had maybe an hour and a half of flying in a vaguely similar plane. He certainly had no idea how the instruments and displays and controls were arrayed in the cockpit.

There were people standing around Morgan in the center. One of the managers sent someone to Google an image of the Caravan’s cockpit and control panels. It was printed out and brought to Morgan.

![](https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/52187967330_65c33be442_o.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1)

Terminal C at Palm Beach International Airport. (Photo by [formulanone](https://www.flickr.com/photos/formulanone/) via Flickr.)

Ingenious perhaps. But it was an older model of the plane. An order went out to get back on Google, and eventually a printout of the right model was given to Morgan. He kept both images in front of him—the older printout was clearer, if slightly inaccurate

Morgan’s sudden command of what Harrison was seeing—where the throttle was and how to use it; what information was on the lone working screen—meant the world.

“It was comforting to have him there to say, ‘Hey, down here, there’s a red handle, do this, do that,’” Harrison said. “He was spot on.”

Franck, meanwhile, was concerned for his dear, maybe dead friend. He could reach one of Allen’s feet—Allen liked to fly barefoot—from where he sat. He occasionally shook it for a sign of life. There was none.

Any calm Morgan felt with the right printout in front of him and his pep talks with Harrison going well was upended by his realization that trying to land at the Boca Raton airport was not going to work. It was May, still a busy season for vacationers and snowbirds in South Florida. There was only one runway, one taxiway, and the control tower sat in the middle of it all. No room for error.

“Hey, change of plans,” Morgan told Harrison.

They would land at Palm Beach International, where Morgan was. Huge runaways; better emergency equipment.

“Good idea,” Harrison managed.

At 12:22, the plane, flying at 5,200 feet, crossed the coastline.

Morgan would have to get Harrison turned north. Flying straight and level was one thing. Managing a turn as a first-time pilot was another.

“Turning is something that can get the plane out of control,” Morgan said. “If you turn too much and you don’t correct, the plane will keep turning and it’ll kind of start a dive if you don’t pull back on the controls. So I just said, ‘I want you to start a slow turn to the right. Keep the coast on your right. You’ll see the interstate. Follow the roads.’”

Now headed north, Morgan coached Harrison down to 4,000 feet, and told him to look at the horizon. He should be able to see the runway at Palm Beach International. Morgan said: It’s 10,000 feet long, almost two miles.

“It’s the biggest runway on the coast of Florida,” Morgan said. “There’s no way you can miss it.”

“Yeah, I think I see it,” Harrison said.

Franck saw it with wonder.

“It looks beautiful from where we are,” he remembers thinking.

The Cessna Caravan was a sturdy plane. It was designed and built to handle landing on rough runways in places like the Bahamas. In theory, landing on a giant runway at a world class airport would not be a problem.

Morgan, though, was worried about some TV antenna towers that Harrison might hit if he descended too quickly. He had Harrison maintain his altitude and fly by the airport on a first pass. He then directed him to do a 270 degree turn and land on a second pass.

Of course, Morgan did not need to tell Harrison controlling the plane’s speed during the final descent and landing would be critical. A plane’s flaps, when deployed, can help with that. Morgan used the printout to direct Harrison on how to engage the flaps.

Morgan tried to tell Harrison what to expect.

“When you put flaps down, it changes the shape of the wing so the plane will want to balloon up,” Morgan said. “I told him, ‘As you put these flaps down, you’re gonna have to put a lot of pressure on the controls forward because the plane’s going to want to climb.’”

Climb too suddenly and the plane could stall. Lawn dart.

Harrison put the flaps down, and was spooked. To him, working hard to push the plane’s nose down risked starting a dive.

“I’ve already done that route today,” Harrison thought.  “I was like, ‘Bobby, I don’t like it, man. It’s doing something squirrely. I don’t know if something’s broke on the airplane. I don’t know what’s going on.’”

He tried it once more; same mortifying result.

“Is it possible to land this thing without flaps?” Harrison asked.

It was, Morgan said, but there would be worry about coming in too fast.

“All right, no flaps,” Harrison declared. “I ain’t doing that shit again.”

The plane was over I-95, and Franck was glad those in their cars did not know what was going on.

“You’re looking down and you’re thinking, these people don’t know what the hell is going on up here—you know, idiots flying a plane,” Franck said. “Not only could we take ourselves out, we could take out other people.”

---

## **“How do I stop this thing?”**

Harrison, barefoot and in shorts , was carrying baggage his improvised flying partner Franck could not have known about. His wife Brittny’s sister Summer had lost her husband to a heart attack when she was six months pregnant with their child. That’s exactly how far along Brittny was in her pregnancy. Darren and Brittny had seen first hand the lasting hurt and damage of such a loss.

“If I die, she’ll be just like Summer,” Harrison said of his wife.

Those in the control tower at Palm Beach worked to limit the chances of Harrison dying. They halted takeoffs and arrivals and cleared the runways for Harrison and the Caravan. Emergency teams were put in place on the tarmac.

The Caravan was now at 2,000 feet, its speed 136 knots.

Harrison could see a tall building in the distance. His family’s window and flooring company had done work for the real estate outfit that owned it. Harrison aimed for the building, and felt if he got down to it but still above it safely, he’d have a good chance of landing.

“As long as I don’t clip it, but be right above it,” he said to himself, “I should be able to be lined up perfectly to come in.”

It was 12:33. Harrison and Franck had stayed alive for 35 minutes since Allen had complained his head hurt. The plane was down to 1,650 feet, but its speed was back up to 143 knots.

“He’s got a big runway and plenty of runway as long as he doesn’t miss it,” Morgan said. “As long as he is not too fast. Because the faster you are, the plane will just float and it doesn’t wanna land. It just wants to keep flying.”

Harrison’s final approach was unfolding as planned, but his speed was an issue.

“You’re doing everything perfect. I just need you to slow down,” Morgan told him. “I need you to take some throttle out of it.”

 Harrison told Franck to pull the throttle back.“

If we fall out of the sky at this point, it doesn’t matter,” Harrison thought to himself,. We’re not that high. Might blow the gear off, but we’ll be fine.

Franck did as he was told.

The plane was at 740 feet, 130 knots.

 Morgan told Harrison that once he reached a certain altitude, the plane would disappear from his radar screen. Morgan would still be able to talk to Harrison, but he would not see what was happening with the plane.

“As you get in real close, the runway’s gonna get wider,” Morgan said.

Then, the plane was off the radar. Ten, maybe 15 seconds passed. It was 12:35, and the plane was going 115 knots.

“I’m on the runway,” Harrison announced. “How do I stop this thing?”

Thrilled, Morgan told Harrison to run his bare feet up to the very top of the rudder pedals. Then just push down on them, he said. Simple enough, given all he had done. The plane came to a halt.

There was joy in the radar room; the pilots in planes on the tarmac expressed amazement; and then there was laughter.

“Do you want me to park this thing?” Harrison asked.

Just turn off the engine, he was told. Harrison had once owned an airboat, one that used an airplane engine. He figured out how to kill the engine on his own.

“When the motor stopped is when I finally lost it,” Harrison said. “It was pretty intense.”

Franck noticed Harrison’s demeanor change.

“I looked over and his hands were shaking. That was the first time that I could see that he was human,” Franck said. “Otherwise he was like this robot, this machine.”

The machine said a long, stream-of-consciousness prayer.

“I’m telling you,” Franck said, “it just, it just flowed nonstop.”

Harrison thought about calling his wife, but held off. The last part of his prayer had been for Ken Allen. Allen had started to come to, but he was fighting the emergency personnel’s effort to get him out of the plane. He thought the plane was still in the air, and that someone was trying to throw him out of it.

The EMS folks got Allen into a vehicle, went 300 yards and placed him in another ambulance to get to St. Mary’s Medical Center, the closest hospital to the airport.

“I could tell he was still alive,” Franck said of Allen as he was put in the second ambulance. “He’s moving, but he’s not saying anything.”

---

## **“I was very honest about our chances”**

Nishant Patel never fully made it out of his surgical scrubs from that morning’s procedure when he got the call around 1 p.m. Ken Allen had been seen at St. Mary’s, taken into the emergency room to be treated for what everyone suspected was a stroke.

“The good news is you didn’t have a stroke,” one of the doctors told Allen. But there was some not great news, too. 

Allen was found to have what is called an aortic dissection—not a complete rupture of the aorta, but a tearing of its layers. It’s a condition whose outcome is directly connected to the speed with which it is diagnosed, and how quickly surgery is performed. The condition had a 98 percent mortality rate if untreated for a week. It was unclear how long the tear in Allen’s aorta had been present.

St. Mary’s, anyway, was not the place for the required surgery, and while it would inject a delay into the situation, St. Mary’s doctors wanted to send Allen six miles away to Palm Beach Gardens. They had Patel’s phone number.

On a day of options good and bad, Patel was the best, and he just so happened to be on duty, if a little tired from his earlier surgery.

“Lights and sirens,” Patel told St. Mary’s, meaning Allen needed to be rushed to him. “A helicopter if available.”

Allen went by ambulance, and Patel saw him in the emergency room at Palm Beach Gardens. He was alarmed to discover Allen had what’s called a mal perfusion. Patel said it helps to imagine the aorta as a pipe with branches coming off it—to the kidneys, the liver, and the brain. The branch to Allen’s brain was compromised.

Allen had been able to speak to his wife via Facetime while at St. Mary’s. He told her he loved her, and was headed to serious surgery with a 50-50 chance of survival. She got on the phone to his friends in Lake Wales. One of them would fly her to Palm Beach.

Franck had been able to join Allen and Patel at Palm Beach Gardens.

“He looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Patel said of Franck.

Franck did manage to tell Allen some of the details of the rare feat he and Harrison had pulled off.

“I’m proud of you,” Allen whispered.

Franck teared up.

“You know, what we did was incredible,” he told Patel. “But it won’t be a good day unless you save his life.”

Allen, fighting a powerful sleepiness, wasn’t full of confidence.

“I knew I was probably going to die,” Allen said. “But honest to God, I was not scared. I wasn’t weeping or crying.”

Survival, Patel knew, was only part of it. He wondered how badly Allen’s brain had been injured. Was it still being injured as he was prepped for surgery?

“Are we gonna get recovery of neurological function, or is Ken gonna have this devastating neurological injury for the rest of his life?” Patel said.

By the time Allen was in the operating room, it had been three hours since he landed. Patel had ordered his team to suit up again. Patel’s own daughter had undergone serious heart surgery, and the experience made him commit to communicating with patients with both candor and great care.

“I was very honest about our chances of getting him through, but then reassured him that he was at the right place to get it done,” Patel said.

Patel likes to operate in a room kept as cold as possible. The thermostat, he said, wouldn’t allow him to go below 50 degrees. As for Allen, he was about to get cold, too.

Patel and his team initiated what’s called hypothermic circulatory arrest. Allen’s head was packed in ice; a heart-lung machine, used so that the heart can be operated on, pumped cold blood throughout the body. Allen’s body temperature would be reduced to 18 degrees celsius.

The procedure took nine hours, though the most critical work of replacing the damaged segment of the aorta with a polyester fabric, had to be completed in one 60-minute stretch.

“You’re just chopping that piece of pipe out,” Patel said, “and putting in a new piece of piping.”

Once done, Allen’s body temperature would be returned to normal. He was sewn up. 

Allen would spend six days in the intensive care unit. But he’d wake up, be able to move his limbs. Neurological damage, if any, was minimal.

Upon discharge, Patel gave Allen a final briefing. No restrictions in your life going forward. Do anything you want.

“You’ll know what you can do as you heal up,” he said. “You know, if you want to have a bourbon, go drink a bourbon.”

Even fly a plane.

![](https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/IMG_0525.jpeg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1)

Ken Allen and Dr. Nishant Patel. (Photo courtesy of Ken Allen)

---

## **Epilogue**

More than two years later, Ken Allen still doesn’t believe what happened, what the two men in the plane and a third in an operating room gown pulled off. 

“I don’t understand it,” he said of the entire episode. “We all three should be dead, right? I mean, honest to God, we all three should be dead.”

Amazed and haunted, he’s pored over the flight data, mapped the route, and listened to what little communications were recorded. The data don’t lie. Darren and Russ did it.

In order to continue flying, the Federal Aviation Administration made Allen take multiple physical, neurological and cognitive functional tests. His effort to regain his clearance to fly would take 17 months involve being seen by six doctors.

He’s back to flying all the time now, including the very same Cessna Caravan.

And he has had a few bourbons.

![](https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/IMG_0570.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1)

Russ Franck, Ken Allen, Darren Harrison, and Bobby Morgan, smiling together outside Allen’s plane, well after the events of May 10, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Ken Allen.)

In the days after Allen’s surgery, Nishant Patel did a news conference relating some of what happened. He even got to enjoy a quirky moment of celebrity after he operated on Allen, something he’d never recounted publicly.

A man had been diagnosed with an aortic dissection, and was set to be treated at a hospital about 10 miles from Palm Beach Gardens. The man’s wife wasn’t comfortable.

“Where is the pilot doctor? Is he here?” she asked the staff. Told he wasn’t, the man and his wife asked to be transferred to Palm Beach Gardens, where Patel was in surgery.

“I finished up my bypass surgery, ended up doing his operation,” Patel said of the man. “He did fine.”

Franck, for his part, said he got asked so often about the flight by family and friends that he chose to write up an account for the members of his church in Lake Wales.

“People ask me if we panicked and my answer is we didn’t have time,” he wrote. He then added, “Now comes the God part.”

Franck wrote that both he and Harrison had felt a presence in the cockpit, a force keeping their heads clear. He wrote that the feeling for him was so powerful that he felt in direct contact with his God.

 Franck then added a line about Harrison, one he wrote with gratitude and something like grace.

“I am convinced that God has plans for that boy.”

Harrison, it turns out, had always had plans to try and check out an airport control tower. After Ken Allen was off to the hospital, he got his chance. Airport personnel arranged for Harrison to get access to the tower, and once inside, he made it to the top, where there were computer screens and windows.

“Pretty amazing what you just did,” one of the men in the tower said.

 “Man, I was just trying to stay alive,” Harrison said back to him.

“No, I don’t think you realize what you just did,” the worker insisted. And then he pointed at the top right corner of one of the computer screens. There, the number 27 shone.

“The runway that you landed on, there was a 27 mile an hour crosswind when you landed,” he said. “Doing that is unheard of in that airplane.”

Harrison also got to meet Bobby Morgan. It was quite a moment. They took pictures. Morgan wanted to ask a million questions of Harrison.

“But I didn’t,” he said. “I knew what he had been through.”

Morgan was given the rest of the afternoon off. The next day, he did what he loved to do – he went flying.

Harrison’s friends rallied to get him home quickly. Brittny, his wife, had dropped her phone in shock when Harrison had told her what had happened. The friends could get a plane to him, he was told.

“Dudes,” he told them, “I’m just going to rent a car.”

There were some local news accounts about the passenger landing a plane, though Harrison said he had no interest in talking with reporters. He did do a spot with his wife Brittny on the Today Show. 

And then he went back to his job with Sunshine Interiors in Lakeland. Brittny gave birth to a healthy girl, Mary Margaret. Harrison’s pals joked he was some kind of guardian angel. Some online trolls alleged he must have had some experience as a pilot.

In a world of conspiracy theories, it’s a doozy: that Harrison, with his life, and the lives of two others, on the line, would fake his lack of knowledge to make it all a better story should they survive. To Harrison, it’s a nutty annoyance.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Fuck them. I’m the one that sat in that seat.”

 In that spirit, Harrison got himself a new head cover for his golf clubs: “Not Today” they read.

---

*This story was made possible by the support of **Sunday Long Read subscribers** and publishing partner **Ruth Ann Harnisch**. Header photograph [**of Palm Beach International Airport by **Don Ramey Logan****](https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Palm_Beach_International_Airport_photo_D_Ramey_Logan.jpg)* *under the [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed). Edited by* ***Jacob Feldman****.*

## Joe Sexton

Joe Sexton was a longtime reporter and editor at the New York Times and ProPublica. He is the author of *The Lost Sons of Omaha*.

 
 

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