In 1991 Kirk Douglas survived a helicopter crash.

The three-time Oscar nominee, who died February 5 at age 103, addressed surviving a tragic helicopter crash that killed two men in his 2000 memoir, Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning. The crash happened on February 13, 1991.

"l'll never forget the date," Douglas wrote of the accident.

He was a passenger in a helicopter piloted by his friend, cartoon voice artist Noel Blanc, and copilot Michael Carra. As the helicopter took off from California's Santa Paula Airport, it collided with a Pitts aerobatic plane. Lee Manelski, 47, and student pilot David Tomlinson, 18, were flying that plane, which was taxiing down the runway in a safety exercise.

Douglas recalled, "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 said he had little recollection of the events that happened next, including his rescue by a flight mechanic after his helicopter dropped 20 to 40 feet (approx. 6 to 12 meters) and crashed onto tarmac.

"But we were alive in the tangled wreckage," Douglas wrote. "David and Lee were dead in the smoldering remains. At that moment I was unconscious. I didn't know that from this day forward I would be asking: Why did they die? Why was I alive?”

Ace In The Hole directed by Billy Wilder
is a much over looked classic …….

The social message of how the press can
milk a tragedy still stands strong today ……….Watch it if you can



ROCKMAN