A Wing, A Prayer, And A Flat Bed Truck

So read the headline of the Portland, Oregon newspaper, The Oregonian, May 14, 2000. The front page of the newspaper showed a picture of a small airplane on the back of a flatbed truck with the pilot standing beside it describing what had happened. His description went like this:

The pilot knew he was in trouble and that he would be forced to land his plane, but where? In the few moments it took him to shut down the plan's electronics and fuel system, Hamer (the pilot) nosed to earth and felt the plane settled down and land on something solid but he couldn't figure out why he was still heading north and doing so at a pretty good clip. He glanced to his left and saw trees zooming by, and then he glanced to his right and saw the same thing. Then he looked ahead and saw the cab of a truck going the same direction he was. Slowly it came to him that he had landed on the back of a flat bed truck instead of the road he was trying to land on. "Somehow he had managed to land his 21-foot-long plane on an 8-foot wide, 24-foot flatbed portion of a tractor-trailer rig. Both Hamer and the truck driver, Filiberto Cornoa Ambriz, were unhurt in the Thursday afternoon crash."

"I consider myself very lucky" said the 63 year old Hamer, of Nevada City, California. "Somebody was looking out for me." Hamer went on to say that if he had landed a few inches to the right, his plane, a Lancair 235 that he had built with his own hands would have tumbled off the truck and probably burst int flames. Likewise, had he been a bit higher, he may have put down directly in front of the truck and been crushed. The nose of the plane struck the truck in the upper passenger side of the sleeper berth, leaving a large cone shaped dent in the steel.

"I just happened to hit him fast enough. It hit him like a dart and stuck," said Hamer a retired Air Force officer.

Many of you could share your own stories of how your life was spared at some time or another because "someone was watching out for you." Which of us has not been driving late at night, momentarily gone to sleep at the wheel and suddenly we woke up just in time? Or the flight that we were scheduled to take but we were somehow delayed and couldn't board that flight, and we learned that it crashed and all on board were killed. Or some other narrow escape. We have all had them, they were real. It happened, we saw it, we were there. We will never forget it.

Did those things "just happen"? Long ago, God promised "to give His angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways." Psalms 91:11