Monday, May 24, 2004

Tour Bus Plane Crash

It was early evening, and I was the driver of a tour bus that was on it's way home from a gambling trip at Atlantic City. I was driving along the freeway, but apparently took a wrong exit - because I ended up driving along regular city streets. Before I could find a place to get back onto the freeway, I had driven into the "ghetto" part of town. The roads were narrow, there was no place for me to stop or turn around, and there were many "undesirable" folks wandering the streets, looking for trouble. I didn't want to stop the bus and take a chance that someone would try to rob my passengers, so I kept making turns until I ended up driving down a road full of apartment buildings.

By now it was the middle of the night, and almost everyone was sleeping, so I felt safe in stopping the bus and asking for directions. I knocked on the apartment door of an older lady, and she told me that I just needed to go a few streets over and I'd find an exit that led to the freeway. But for whatever reason, I didn't go directly back to the bus and onto the freeway... instead, I went inside the apartment and was looking out the window at the planes that would fly over. The apartment that I was in was located directly at the end of an airport runway, and so when the planes would take off and land they would nearly hit the building they were so low.

As I was watching a small bi-plane take off, I noticed that it was even lower than the other planes, and that the engine didn't sound right. I grabbed my digital camera and headed for the door, because I knew it was going to crash. As I went outside, where it was dark and snowy, I could see an orange glow coming from a few hundred yards away. Me and a few other folks went to investigate and found that the plane had crashed into a building that was housing a show car, Tony Stewart's Home Depot #20 NASCAR Chevy to be exact. The plane had crashed through the top of the roof, directly down onto Tony's car, smashing it almost flat. As onlookers started to gather, I was the only one with a camera, so I took as many pictures as I could.