To read article Gerry wrote click here.

Here is Gerry’s interview with CNN

Mad Joe Swooshes The Pie Shop – Written By Gerry Cullen, February 18, 2010

The little airplane skimmed over the restaurant’s roof, missing the peaks by a foot or two. I heard the roaring engine before I saw it. The plane was coming fast. I looked up at its belly as it flashed over my head, maybe twelve feet away. I was the only person in the restaurant’s parking lot.

Diving more steeply after crossing the restaurant, the blue and white plane passed between two pole lights in the restaurant’s parking lot, brushed the trees between the lights, crossed the six lane freeway below and exploded into an office building. All this in a second or two.

Death by a random airplane crash has not been on my list of things to worry about. Until today. Today a airplane almost wiped me out.

An unhappy local pilot decided to suicide bomb a local IRS office using his airplane. He set his house on fire with his wife and cat inside, drove to the airport and fired up his Piper Cherokee. Fifteen minutes later he sailed over me and vaporized himself and an IRS employee.

Good thing for me this lunatic was a competent pilot.

Accurately diving a Cherokee at high speed with full throttle takes above-average piloting skill. The higher the speed, the controls become far more sensitive; tiny control changes will cause big flight path changes. I know because I used to teach flying in Cherokees.

If Joseph Stack had made one tiny bad control movement he easily could have hit the pie shop’s roof. A slightly larger control mistake or turbulence would have put him in the restaurant parking lot where I was standing. Either way, I would have been covered in burning gas and plane parts.

But no.

Mad Joe skillfully screamed over me and he pitched the Cherokee’s nose further down to hit the lowest floor of the building  He arrived squarely at the center of the first floor windows about two hundred and fifty feet from where I was standing. There was no wind that morning and his screaming passage blew a slight puff of wind at me and then a reversal of pressure. I later remembered that feeling from standing on a subway platform as an express train clacked by.

Still alone at the pie shop’s parking lot, I stood on the curb, holding my car key. Not a lot of people eat breakfast there.

When the plane hit, the office building’s mirrored windows shuddered and warped causing a temporary fun-house distortion to their normal reflections. The plane’s impact shock hit me like an soft, overall body punch. I wondered what happened to the office workers. The pie shop workers later told me that their whole building shook.

In a fraction of a second a bright orange and black fireball ballooned smokily from the airplane’s entry hole. Windows steadily blew out from the first story and, oddly, pink pieces of fiberglass insulation began to swirl and climb in the heat of the fire. Venetian blinds fluttered out. A necklace of dark orange fire appeared where the windows were missing.

The freeway traffic below continued.  I looked around and was still apparently the only observer. My hands were shaking but I decided to report the crash. It was hard to stop looking at the growing fire climb up the building.

Just as the fire reached the second floor a passing police car stopped on the access road. The officer got out and called someone on his cell phone. I wondered if he was as surprised and I was.

Four minutes later, several fire trucks showed up and the firemen began climbing the limestone retaining wall to enter the building. Freeway drivers began to stop to see what the firemen were doing and the freeway quickly shut down. The building burned until late afternoon.

No more pie shop breakfasts. There’s a coffee shop about a mile up the freeway, nestled between a Big Lots Store and an HEB Supermarket. The freeway overpass protects coffee shop from a northern attack. I’m safer there.

Gerry Cullen, February 18, 2010