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Kansas pilot returns to crash scene to jog his memory

WICHITA, Kansas (KSN) – A small plane made an emergency landing on the Tallgrass Golf course this weekend in Kansas.

The plane landed on its belly and the pilot and passenger made it out with barely a scratch.

Seventeen-year-old Christian Dell and his girlfriend, 18-year-old Nicole Klusener, both from Andover, are lucky to be alive and walking away from this plane crash. Christian wanted to come back to the scene because he says he doesn’t remember anything.

“We crawled out from what they tell me. I can’t remember,” said Dell.

He only remembers clipping the tree and waking up in an ambulance.

“There’s that tree that we clipped, the shorter one,” Dell said. “We just barely came over the roof of those houses.”

Dell has a broken nose and cheek bone. His girlfriend, has minor scraps and a concussion. They were coming back from Nashville, planning on landing at Jabara Airport safely, but the engine gave out.

“You never think it’ll happen to you and it did. We were trying to restart it, but yea it didn’t restart.”

He had two options, go into panic mode or save himself and his girlfriend. His first reaction was landing the plane safely.

“Whenever we’re up with my instructor, we always talk about what happens if your engine fails here. Pick a spot and land there,” Dell said. “That’s kind of what happened. You pick a spot and make it there.”

Dell recently got his pilot’s license, but had been flying for the past two years and says he has a lot of hours experience. He’s just happy things didn’t turn for the worse.

“We’re really lucky we that we got away with the lack of injuries that we did. As far as plane crashes go, this is pretty good.”

The NTSB is still investigating. As for Dell, he says he will fly again, but he may wait for a couple of months before he goes up again.