A Deaf Woman Survived Being Hit by a Plane While Walking Her Dog

A woman was walking her dog last Tuesday afternoon in Long Beach when a man flying his homemade airplane dropped out of the sky and slammed into her.

The woman, Tiffany Harrison, never heard the danger coming. Her sister, Brittany McFall, who wasn’t there when Tiffany was hit by a homemade plane, told ABC7 that Tiffany didn’t even have time to react before the home-built, two-seater aircraft crash-landed in a soccer field and hit her.

“We couldn’t even believe it because it’s something that doesn’t happen,” said Brittany’s sister, making quite the understatement.  

Harrison suffered a fractured spine, a broken pelvis, and a nasty leg wound that needed surgery. Her dog walked away fine. Her partner, Veronica Barrera, saw the plane descending from the parking lot and could only watch.

A Deaf Woman Survived Getting Hit by a Falling Homemade Plane

The pilot is a man in his 60s, who said he’d lost power mid-flight on his way from Long Beach to French Valley and radioed a final, resigned message: “I don’t think I’m going to make it, uh, I’m going… I’m going to pick a field here.”

He did eventually find the field, but slammed into Tiffany Harrison along the way. The Long Beach Fire Department arrived to find the wrecked plane not as wrecked as they would’ve imagined; its landing gear was destroyed, but the fuselage was mostly intact.

According to Dennis Lord, the manager of the hangar the pilot was planning to stop at, the plane wasn’t some sketchy, illegal plane whipped together in a guy’s garage. It was certified by the FAA. You can probably spot one flying somewhere overhead in Southern California if you know what to look for.

Harrison’s family says she has a long road to recovery ahead, but thankfully, she is alive, as is her dog. The pilot survived, too, so luckily the worst-case scenario was avoided.