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Teen In Davis Islands Crash Thought He Was Going To Die

News Channel 8 photo by KATY HENNIG

Mitchell Kirby is recovering at Tampa General Hospital with a broken leg and foot. The small plane carrying Kirby and Daniel Greenwald was coming in for a landing Friday at Peter O'Knight Airport on Davis Islands when it hit the mast of a sailboat and crashed. Greenwald's injuries were minor.

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By NATALIE SHEPHERD

News Channel 8

Published: November 30, 2008

TAMPA - Mitchell Kirby is lying in a Tampa General Hospital bed with a broken leg and foot.

Those injuries are seemingly a stroke of luck, considering the 19-year-old Princeton University sophomore thought he was going die when the single-engine airplane he was in crashed on Davis Islands on Friday morning.

"The first thing I thought after we hit it was, 'Wow, I might die right now,'" Kirby said Sunday night. "I was looking up at the canopy and just the glass shattered. We came to a stop and I just couldn't believe I was alive."

Kirby and pilot Daniel Greenwald, a local plastic surgeon, was landing in an Extra 300 single-engine aircraft at Peter O. Knight Airport about 11:14 a.m., authorities say. The plane clipped a 50-foot sailboat mast, hit the edge of the Seddon Channel sea wall and flipped over.

The plane crashed on airport property about 50 feet shy of the runway, Tampa Fire Rescue officials said.

Pilots at the airport helped Kirby and Greenwald, 48, out of the wreckage. Greenwald also suffered injuries that were not life-threatening, authorities said.

Kirby, a graduate of Hillsborough High School, has a sense of humor about the crash. He said he and Greenwald were performing aerobatic stunts such as loops and barrel rolls before landing.

"It's funny because that's the stuff you would think would be dangerous," he said.

Kirby received his pilot's license last summer.

"I'll probably go up again, but it will take awhile for me to get back into it," he said.

His mother, Bonnie Kirby Goldberg, said she was getting ready Friday to go to the airport and fly with her son.

"I just can't believe he survived it, that he got out of this thing looking like my beautiful son," she said.

Kirby said he expects to be out of the hospital in the next several days. He said he won't be returning to classes at Princeton in January but plans to finish his fall semester of studies at home in Tampa.

Tribune reporter Ray Reyes contributed to this report.

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