Van C. Sorensen, Mapleton, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson and Benjamin Bahlmann, August 17th, 2001: Saving the legacy tape no. 288 and 289

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VAN C. SORENSEN ugu t 17th, 2001 that. And at times- they love to play games- and so they'd called it ' Tail Chasing. And so they'd get about ten planes in a row and just follow each other through the air and just do everything that they can do. You know. It was a pretty wild ride. But on one of our training missions, we were- from our base in North Carolina ­we were sent down to South to Carolina to use an artillery range as our practice range. And the pilot I was with made a bad mistake and dove when he shouldn't have dove. And when we came down there was basically no way we could come out of it. And he realized what he had done, but it was too late. And there was a ground control man on the radio and he'd told everybody we had crashed. In fact, he ordered the crash crew to come out and pick the remains up. But what really happened, the pilot, as he came down, he could see he was in trouble, and so he slide that plane down the side of ridge like this. And kept the nose up - got speed enough to get his nose up - and sliding sideways down a draw all the while. And finally, in the bottom of the drawl, we were bouncing on the tree tops. If you can imagine. And that plane finally got out of there. It shouldn't have, that's all there is to it. It shouldn't have, but it did. Now, he was, of course, reported to the commanding officer- first that we'd crashed. And then, when they told him that we had survived, then he found out what happened. When we landed, he was waiting. And he said to me first, "Are you alright?" And I said, "Yes, sir. I'm alright." 39