"I heard the ka-pow and then the engine just quit,” said Jay Jarvis.
Jarvis has undergone several surgeries since that accident three weeks ago.
IMAGES: Small plane crash in Long View
Jarvis said the engine failure couldn't have happened at a worse time just a few hundred feet up near the end of the runway.
Jarvis showed Channel 9 some of the injuries he got during the crash about a half a mile from the airport.
HICKORY, N.C. —
He said he doesn't remember much after his Beechcraft Bonanza crashed, striking a tree, but he does recall the moments leading up to the accident.
The plane had just taken off and had climbed to only a few hundred feet.
CHOPPER 9: Small plane crashes in Long View
"We heard a big bang, just like a small explosion in the engine compartment. It wasn't spitting or sputtering just a ka-bam. I knew deep down it was just some kind of catastrophic failure of the engine," Jarvis said.
Jarvis and his three passengers were going to Greenville, South Carolina.
After the engine quit, he had only 15-20 seconds to get the plane down.
His first instinct was to keep the plane from stalling, hoping to buy time to find a place to land.
As he searched, all he saw were trees and homes that he desperately wanted to avoid.
"Not many options. There were no options. The last memory I have is getting by one of the houses and thinking, 'I don't know if we are going to clear this,' and then all of the sudden we just got around one of the houses, and then breathing a sigh of relief and realizing there is a tree lined up right on my nose," Jarvis said.
Jarvis used his rudder at the very last second to keep him and his passengers from feeling the full impact of the tree by slightly turning the plane.
The tree struck the wing instead.
Out of the four people inside the plane he was injured the worst and will have a lengthy recovery but has already been helped by the people he was flying with that day.
"I didn't truly feel better until after I talked to everybody, my passengers, and when I found out they were all OK then I started feeling better. Then I started getting confidence from folks saying, 'Hey you did the best in a bad situation,'" Jarvis said.
Already the National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report has come out supporting what Jarvis told Channel 9. They found a hole in the engine case near the No. 1 cylinder.
ORIGINAL STORY:
FAA, NTSB investigate after 4 hurt in plane crash on takeoff from Hickory
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