Dee Arata, Yuba City, California woman survives plane crashing into her after failing to properly take off as single mom describes miracle survival.
Cheating almost certain death … A California driver has told of her disbelief after surviving a small plane crashing into her pickup truck after the plane failing to take off Tuesday. Even more incredulous, the pilot of the downed plane also managed to walk away unscathed…
Dee Arata, 41, was on her way to work from her Yuba City home when a single-engine Republic RC-3 crop dusting plane reportedly hit a fence and then spiraled into her white pickup truck on a backroad in Sutter County around 6 a.m.
‘I saw it before it hit, like, seconds, if that, it may have been one second,’ Arata a single mom told KCRA.
Freak accident
Arata who prefers taking the backroads along country fields told KCRA that she’s normally used to seeing crop dusting planes flying overhead and adjacent to roads as they dust fields below. But this time something was off…
‘Like, I saw something out of my peripheral vision, and it looked big and white and so I turned my head, and it was right there. And I knew it was a plane, and I said out loud, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna get hit,” she told the outlet.
Firefighters told the station the crop-dusting plane didn’t get enough air as it tried to take off at a runway near the road, leading to the ‘freak accident.’ Neither the pilot nor Arata were badly injured.
‘I can’t believe I got hit by an airplane and survived,’ she said.
Images from the scene show the truck’s windshield broken and the driver’s side door mangled. The plane was several yards away in a field.
Arata was reportedly driving to her job as an operating room nurse and usually avoids major roads that can be clogged with traffic.
‘I would rather take country roads and not worry about the traffic or some car crashing into me,’ she told KCRA.
‘I never once thought, ‘You are going to have to worry about planes.’’
Following the accident, Arata was able to get out of her car and only had a limp.
Before she went to the hospital, she even checked on the pilot.
‘He’s like, ‘Are you OK?’ And we hugged, you know,’ she recalled.
‘And he’s like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I was like that’s why it’s an accident. Accidents happen.’
