Fifteen Feet: What a Plane Crash Taught Me About Being Human
Three years ago today, three people should have died 15 feet from my house. They didn’t.
We received a phone call telling us that a plane had hit our house. It is one of those sentences your brain doesn’t immediately know how to process. When we returned home, the scene was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The NTSB and FAA were there. Multiple police departments and fire districts had responded. For nearly 48 hours, access to the roads around our home was completely shut down. We had to show identification just to get in and out.
About 15 feet from our house sat a six-seat airplane. It was resting upright in the woods with its tail buried deep into the hillside. There were three people onboard, and somehow, all three walked away. They were confused, shaken and cut up, but they were alive.
That mattered even more because around the same time, there had been several small-aircraft crashes making national news where the outcomes were very different. People died. We understood how fortunate everyone had been.
As I’ve thought about that day over the past three years, I’ve become increasingly interested in what happened in the seconds before that airplane came to rest in our woods. The pilot didn’t have time to search for an answer. There was no prompt to write. There was no AI assistant to ask. There wasn’t time to evaluate a dozen recommendations and choose the one with the highest probability of success.
Something much older took over: training, repetition, experience, judgment and instinct. The things the pilot had practiced over and over became almost automatic when there were only seconds available to make decisions. That repetitive training mattered. Human instinct mattered. Experience mattered. Three people went home that day.
There is another part of this story that has stayed with me for a completely different reason. After the crash, I sent a message to my team describing what had happened and what I had experienced. Several people said it sounded AI-generated. That was three years ago, when generative AI was only beginning to enter our everyday lives. At the time, I mostly laughed about it. Today, I think about it differently.
We are now surrounded by systems capable of answering questions, creating content, analyzing information and recommending decisions at a speed that would have seemed extraordinary just a few years ago. Those capabilities are incredible. But there are moments in life when there isn’t time to ask, there isn’t time to prompt and there isn’t time to wait for a recommendation.
That’s when what we’ve built inside ourselves matters. Our experience. Our judgment. Our ability to recognize something isn’t right. Our instincts. Our training. Even that feeling in your stomach telling you to act. These aren’t outdated human characteristics that technology will eventually make unnecessary. I believe they become more important as technology becomes more capable.
We should absolutely teach people how to use AI, but we also need to keep teaching people how to think without it. How to make decisions. How to trust experience. How to practice until knowledge becomes instinct. How to act when the answer isn’t sitting on a screen in front of us.
Three years later, there is one other reminder of that day living in our house. Charlie, our dog, still struggles with loud noises. Whatever he experienced that day left its own mark. The investigators eventually packed up, the police and fire departments left, the roads reopened and the airplane was removed. From the outside, everything eventually returned to normal.
But every once in a while, I’ll be outside doing yardwork and look toward that spot in the woods. Fifteen feet. I think about the airplane, the three people inside it, the pilot and the decisions made in seconds. And I think about how differently the story could have ended.
Everybody was saved that day. Three years later, that is still the part that matters most to me.
As AI becomes more capable, let’s continue building better technology. But let’s also make sure we’re developing the judgment, experience, instinct and humanity we’ll need during the moments when there isn’t time to ask technology what to do.
Be Human First.
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