View of airplane from the street in the early morning hours
(click image to view full screen)

View from the platform just prior to rescuing the pilot
(click image for larger view in another window)

Oman has had a more frightening mishap. In 1991, Warren helped rescue him after Oman fell from a biplane on which he was wing-walking at Hillsboro Airport near Portland. As a crowd watched Oman dangle by a nylon safety harness, Warren and another man stood in the bed of a speeding pickup truck, and raced down the runway. When the plane dropped low enough to reach Oman, Warren's partner cut him free and allowed him to drop into the truck. For the past three months, Warren has used his $18,000 Cessna 150L to commute from his home at Silverdale's private Apex Air Park about 20 miles west of Seattle across Puget Sound. At Boeing Field he would pick up his car and drive to his job at Duwamish Shipyard on West Marginal Way. Not yesterday.
Warren does not know exactly what happened about 5:40 a.m. just seconds before touching down. This he does know: ``Somebody's looking after me.'' Warren said he was within 20 feet of the runway when the aircraft, on its own, rolled hard to the left. As he struggled to regain control, the plane veered away from the airfield, over Joyce Mayovsky in a parking lot near the air-traffic control tower. ``I was inside the lot, driving south along the fence when I saw (aircraft) lights passing low overhead. I thought it was funny. They were so low and not usually there,'' she said. ``All of a sudden the lights stopped and sparks were flying. I waited for a crash but there wasn't one. I was shaking so bad I just sat there.'' Experts say a cause for the Cessna's erratic behavior may never be know for certain, but there are suspicions. Warren suspects swirling air - vortices - caused by passing aircraft. Small aircraft are routinely warned away from large jet aircraft because of these conditions, but there were no large aircraft in the area early yesterday.
Smaller planes had been, though. ``I'd been told (by the tower on his approach) that aircraft had been in the area just a few minutes earlier, maybe three minutes,'' he said. ``I don't know what else it might be.'' Dick Sears, a consulting aeronautical engineer with Aviation Partners Inc. at Boeing Field, said such swirling air can be a produced by even a small aircraft. ``It was a very quiet morning. When the air is still like that, these swirls have been known to hang for minutes,'' Sears said. ``With no wind, they just kind of sit there and spin.'' Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Tim Pile also gave credence to the pilot's suspicion. ``If that's what the pilot said, that's certainly something the investigator will check out.'' Pile said a National Transportation Safety Board investigator has been assigned to the case.
With Warren upside down and fuel leaking from the aircraft, firefighters worked frantically to stabilize the plane, then extricate its pilot. They first waited 2 1/2 hours for confirmation that the power was off in the line. The incident left 2,500 customers from South Dakota Street to East Marginal Way without power for several hours. Tukwila, Seattle and King County Airport fire departments all responded. Because the Cessna was leaking fuel - five to 10 gallons - firefighters sprayed a knee-deep layer of flame retardant foam on the ground under it. The airport shut off nearby fans and diverted heavy aircraft to minimize vibrations. Six firefighters on two ladder units wrapped nylon straps around the plane's propeller and fuselage and hung them from a pair of waiting cranes.
Then Tukwila firefighters trained in high-angle rescues, made their rescue approach on a ladder rig [ladder 54 LTI aerial platform], inching slowly toward an aircraft window. ``With a 2,000-pound plane swinging into the ladder truck, we could have a problem,'' Ewing said. Still buckled in his seat, Warren opened his left window, slid his legs into a harness and unclipped his seat belt. To the cheers and whistles of a crowd of Boeing workers, Warren slid carefully down the wing, stepped on a firefighter's leg for balance then onto the ladder platform. ``The firefighters did a good job,'' he said. The crane operators then retrieved his 1,600-pound Cessna 150L shortly after his rescue. First it was lowered to the ground, then righted and set gently down on its landing gear.
At Duwamish Shipyard Inc., Warren was one of three crane operators. Now there are two. Macomber, one of the two still on the job, said: ``A lot of crane operators are pilots. They like being in the action seat. To put it succinctly, he's a man of adventure. He's a fast-thinking, fast-talking kind of guy.'' Macomber said Warren has a quick wit, used to sell real estate, once ran a business exporting goods to Russia and is studying Russian.
Kyle McCleary, the shipyard's controller, said his office learned of Warren's predicament in a call from the airport tower. ``We might have an employee of yours up here,'' he described the tower worker as saying. Shortly before his shift would have ended yesterday, Warren dropped by to pick up his last paycheck, then went back to Boeing Field to inspect the Cessna. Macomber said Warren told him he was initially scared while hanging on the line, but eventually relaxed. ``He was fine. Here's a guy who loves cranes and airplanes and he's all rat-nested in the wires, surrounded by all the toys he loves in life.'' By all accounts, Jerry Michael ``Mike'' Warren is in love with flying, say friends. `He's pretty lucky,'' said Seattle Fire Chief Jim Sewell, who was on the scene to see if for himself. ``He should buy a lottery ticket today.''
P-I reporter Rob Taylor and researcher Lytton Smith contributed to this report.