WHEN DON HO FLEW
Sometime in the early 1950s in the skies over Texas, a Lockheed T-33A Shooting Star trainer jet flamed out and began to descend as the pilot at the controls—a native Hawaiian in his early 20s named Donald Tai Loy Ho—realized he’d made a bad mistake. Before taking off from Bryan Air Force Base on a routine training mission, he had failed to get enough fuel, and now he had run out. As Ho recounted years later to a writer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he hastily looked for an emergency landing spot.
“I popped the canopy at about 300 miles per hour,” Ho recalled. “I put her down on a farm. As I was sliding along the ground, the barn was coming up awfully fast. So I put the flaps down, right into the mud.”
Fortunately, Ho wasn’t hurt in the crash landing, and his aircraft escaped serious damage. Although he had to go through the customary investigation, there weren’t any repercussions. The U.S. Air Force, in fact, put him right back in the cockpit to make sure he hadn’t lost his nerve. But after the brush with disaster, Ho was a different man.
Until the incident, he had been “a shy kid, quiet, well behaved,” Ho told the Star-Bulletin interviewer. “The crash made me realize that life was to be enjoyed.”
“If you can survive a crash,” Ho once explained, “you can do anything.”
