We were on the way back to Houston from the VIM users meeting which had been held in Montreal.
For those of you who aren't EE-Talian, VIM
is the Roman's way of saying 6000, as in Control Data 6000 series computers (6400,6500,6600).
Anyhow you can see we ran into some bad luck. The Airplane was a 1960 Mooney M20A we had just purchased.
If you read the article (click on the bigger pictures for enlarged text), it said something about walking away, we don't remember that. We do remember spending a few days in the hospital and slowly recovering from a head concussion.
We did buy another Mooney (a 1968 M20G this time) in Denver two months later and promptly flew it to San Francisco. A beautiful night flight at 14,000 ft over the mountains.
By the way the NTSB was entirely right when they classifed this as Pilot Error, poor preflight planning, continued VFR flight into IFR conditions (it was clear below us), but that pesky fog wouldn't leave and we had to come down sometime. A lesson well learned, after another 10 aircraft we owned they all left us still in one piece. (grd)