Kirk Douglas had survived a helicopter crash in 1991 that killed two people: 'It forever changed his life'
Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas had a near-death experience years before he eventually passed away on Wednesday, February 5, at the age of 103. Douglas, later, recounted the incident, saying it "forever changed" his life.
Douglas was 75 when he had a brush with death during a mid-air collision on February 13, 1991. The crash took the lives of two men, and the acting icon was among the three survivors of the deadly crash. He later wrote a book, describing the date as "the most important day of my life."
The actor was flying in a helicopter as a passenger with his two pilot friends - cartoon voice artist Noel Blanc and copilot Michael Carra. The chopper was taking off at California’s Santa Paula Airport when it collided with a Pitts aerobatic plane. The small plane was being flown by Lee Manelski, 47, and student pilot David Tomlinson, 18. The pair had been taking the plane down the runway in a touch-and-go safety exercise when the collision happened. Manelski and Tomlison tragically died in the incident.
“I’ll never forget the date,” Douglas wrote in his 2000 memoir 'Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning'. "In that horrible fraction of a second, the rotating blades of Noel’s Bell Ranger helicopter sliced into the wing of David and Lee’s Pitts, ripping it open and exposing its fuel to air. Carried by its fateful momentum, the little plane continued to rise forward into the blue sky. An instant later, the fuel caught fire. The Pitts exploded in a fireball.”
Douglas' helicopter fell 20 to 40 feet from the sky without its rotors, and slammed into the tarmac, leaving wreckage everywhere, while the Pitts plane crashed nearly 200 feet down the runway.
"But we were alive in the tangled wreckage. David and Lee were dead in the smoldering remains. At that moment I was unconscious,” Douglas wrote.“I didn’t know that from this day forward I would be asking: Why did they die? Why was I alive?” The actor wrote that as they lay in the wreckage a flight mechanic named Darryl bravely ran towards them and turned off the helicopter’s motor to prevent it from exploding.
“Often, when I am asked about the accident today, people want to know what I experienced at the moment. Did I see a long tunnel with a blazing white light at the other end? Sorry, I saw and heard nothing. If it was there, I missed the show,” he wrote. “I have no remembrance of being pulled from the wreckage, put in an ambulance and brought to the emergency room. I have no recollection of X-rays, CAT scans and the doctors’ examinations.”
The actor, who hospitalized for rib and back injuries, later found out that the crash had compressed his spine to the point that he lost three inches in height. The injuries caused years of physical back pain, with the emotional impact staying with Douglas for his lifetime. Years later, Douglas would come to see the emotional burden as a call from God to continue his life's work.
"It took me a long time to come to this conclusion," Douglas wrote.
"My life was spared in that helicopter crash because there was still some mission that I must fulfill. … Was he reminding me that on the good days, when I felt no pain, I wasn't getting on with the program?"
Douglas said that out of the few things he remembered from the incident was learning the names of the two pilots who had lost their lives from his hospital bed.
"Somewhere out there, not too far from where I lay, the lives of the people who loved them were forever changed… and now mine had as well," he wrote. Nearly three weeks after the crash, Douglas received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award on March 7, 1991. While addressing the crowd at the time, he said that the did not see his life flash before his eyes when he crashed, "but thank God … I got a second chance to see it tonight.”
The Hollywood icon is survived by his wife of 65 years, Anne Douglas, and his sons Michael Douglas, Joel Douglas, and Peter Douglas.