On February 22nd, 2025, at 5:56pm PST, I heard the sound a pilot never wants to hear. My engine started sputtering and quickly stopped. An engine running out of fuel has a very distinctive sound. I quickly ran through the engine restart checklist, but a part of me already suspected what had happened. The engine wasn’t failing mechanically. I had exhausted my usable fuel.
15 seconds in
I found myself at 2,600 feet and 140 knots, above the dense city of Mountain View. I quickly realized that I was now at the controls of a 2000 lb glider, and I had 4 minutes until gravity forced me down to the ground.
What came next were some of the most profound minutes in my life. I went through a rapid set of extreme emotions that resembled a grieving process. I first started off with denial. I told myself this could not be happening, this was not a scenario that could possibly happen to me. I had filled my tanks with far more fuel than needed. My fuel gauges, while generally faulty in an older plane, did not indicate that there was anything wrong during the flight.
30 seconds in
I then jumped from there into a state that I can only describe as disassociated. I told myself that while this was happening, this was merely a level in the video game of life, and if it went haywire, I’d always be able to just restart the level. There would be another shot at it.
I put the plane into best glide and looked at my iPad to assess my options. ForeFlight, the app which most small plane pilots use, has a feature where it draws a circle around your plane to show you where you are able to glide to with your current speed and altitude. I look and realize that I unfortunately don’t have the potential or kinetic energy to quite make it to either Moffett Field or Palo Alto Airport. I’d make it to about a half mile from the start of the runway. Close. But close isn’t good enough if you need to land a plane.
I keyed in 7700. The universal emergency identifier you’re supposed to squawk in an emergency.
45 seconds in
At this point it felt like I was dunked in cold water, and brought into reality. The reality where I only had one shot at this, and the next 3 minutes were going to determine whether this was my last day on Earth. I wasn’t going to be able to make it to any airport and so I now needed to decide what my best options were.
I radio’d ATC “Mayday mayday mayday N9895M experiencing full loss of power, have tried to restart my engine without any luck. I don’t have enough speed or distance to make it to an airport and so I’m looking for a place to land”
ATC replied “Roger, we’ll have a helicopter get ready to look for you and once you’ve landed we’ll send ambulances your way. You’ve got the 101 off to your right hand side as a place to land.”
1 minute 45 seconds in
In that instant, I remembered all the YouTube crash videos I had watched over the years. As a part of my personal training, I forced myself to watch every single fatal small plane crash analysis video, so that I could learn from their mistakes and appreciate the gravity of what it meant to fly small planes. In that moment I remember thinking “I need to make my own call. The 101 is PACKED with rush hour traffic, there’s no empty shoulder on this part of the 101, if I land on there, I will probably crash into a car going 60 mph, I have no air bags, and I will probably cause injury to others and die myself.”
I scanned around the horizon and did my best to remember the geography of Mountain View. Football field? No, too short, would be hard to line up for it, not enough wiggle room. Suburban street that looks empty? Maybe but it’s dusk, I can’t see power lines too easily at dusk, too much of a gamble. I looked out straight in front of me and remembered all those flights coming into SFO. You’re flying over these odd, multi-colored marshes. I remembered a video where they analyzed a pilot in Miami, he decided to land on a bridge vs landing on the water. The water landings actually have a pretty high survival rate if you can swim and it’s not too cold of water. I decided to start aiming for that.
2 minutes 45 seconds in
As I got closer to what looked like a marsh, I realized there were a line of trees I needed to clear. I pulled back on the yoke in the last moments before hitting them, cleared them just barely, but then immediately started hearing the stall horn.
I remembered all those videos I’d watched about pilots coming in for a crash landing, but stalling the plane and spiraling down from 200 ft. The moment I cleared the trees, even though it was deeply counter-intuitive, I jammed the stick down to push the plane towards the ground to pick up speed.
3 minutes 30 seconds in
Having cleared the trees, I then realized I was not over a marsh, but instead a golf course, and there were tons of trees, power lines, and very bumpy hills directly ahead of me. I quickly scanned left and right, and saw that the area to my left had clearer areas to land. I turn the plane, and again realize I need to keep up air speed since your stall speed is higher in a turn. So I have to counter-intuitively, jam the yoke down again.
4 minutes in
I had to pick up speed to dive under some power lines, then bleed off that speed to extend over a huge dip in the landing area for a service road.
In the final thirty seconds before touching down, I could see I had a clear field to land in, I put down my flaps, and slowed the plane down as much as I could. I remember in the final moments before touch-down thinking “how did I possibly manage to thread this needle, I should not have made it this far”
BANG
My nose wheel touched down, but quickly gave out the bumpy grass, a second BANG, and the nose of my plane tipped over and skid along the ground for fifty feet.
And suddenly.
Quiet.
Over the next few weeks, I reflected on those 4 minutes every night before bed. I’d replay the decisions I’d made, clinically analyzing what I could have done differently, and constantly debating whether there was anything I could’ve done to better pilot the plane.
Beyond just the piloting I kept returning to a thought I had in the final moments. It was this belief, a terrifying belief, that this was just a level in a video game and I would get another try.
What unsettled me most was that this belief wasn’t limited to flying.
There were parts of my life where I had been operating with the same assumption. If something felt misaligned, I would fix it later. If a hard conversation loomed, I would defer it. There would always be another at-bat.
The crash removed the illusion of “later.”
I started to run a simple test across all aspects of my life. “If this were my last year, would I tolerate this as-is?”
If the answer was no, I made a structural change.
Health: Before the crash, I had drifted 25 pounds above my peak fitness. I told myself I was “busy but would get to it later.” Within months, I removed the excuses and returned to baseline fitness.
Attention: I audited my dopamine loops. I dramatically reduced social media usage. I stopped outsourcing my focus to algorithms.
Work: I restructured my schedule to focus on my highest-leverage work. Fewer reactive meetings. More deliberate building. I moved to San Francisco to be physically closer to the people and momentum that mattered in this chapter.
Personal life: Within five months of the crash, I brought a foundational chapter of my personal life to a close. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.
If you want to borrow something from my experience without needing your own four-minute emergency:
You don’t need four minutes above a city to change your life.
But you do need to stop assuming there will be another version of it.