A former U.K. Army soldier had to turn his life upside down when his plane caught fire at 1,000 feet during a routine solo flight. The pilot harnessed a rush of adrenaline, and his specialized military training, to prepare for landing and leap from the plane as flames engulfed the cockpit. He saved his own life but sustained massive injuries and faced years of unimaginable suffering.
Now, having reclaimed his life and reformed his identity, 47-year-old Jamie Hull is sharing his story.
Hull was born in Luton, in the south of England, and currently resides in central London. As a young child, he visited Luton Airport with his grandfather, who trained as a pilot toward the end of the Second World War, and fell under the spell of aviation.
Later on in his life, Hull traveled extensively as a backpacker and worked overseas as a professional dive instructor before becoming a police officer at the age of 21. He joined Cambridge University Officer Training Corps, eventually doing a special program and then volunteering for service with the U.K. Special Forces (Reserves), all the while saving money for private flight school in Orlando, Florida, which he attended in 2007.
The Fire
While in Florida, Hull was taught by various flight instructors for a period of one month. They then signed him off to fly solo.“I was flying solo for a period of about eight days,” Hull told The Epoch Times. “Everything was going really well and I was making great progress. ... I was nearing the very end of the course.”
At 12.30 p.m. on Aug. 19, 2007, a few hours before his scheduled check flight with a flight instructor, Hull assessed the weather, performed his pre-flight checks, and ate lunch. After getting permission from air traffic control, he coasted to the runway and took off, soon following a predetermined airborne pattern at an altitude of around 1,000 feet.
His light aircraft did not require a parachute.
Hull said: “I had a moment where I was overhead within the pattern, reported that position and I’m sort of coming downwind. I look out my left-hand canopy window, and suddenly I see a thin streak of visible yellow-orange flame.
“I didn’t quite believe what I saw, and no sooner had I noticed it, I had to make that left-hand banking turn, now crosswind. As I did, so the fire actually breached the cockpit.”
Looking down at his feet to see flames licking at his boots and bare lower legs, Hull panicked. As the dashboard altimeter dropped from 1,000 feet through 900, 800, 700, and further toward the ground, Hull knew it was now or never to attempt an emergency landing.
“I came up with a game plan to actually veer away from the concrete runway in the distance, which was directly in line of sight,” he said. “I pulled gently on the stick to my left, just a few degrees, and that caused the aircraft to steer away. Then I headed toward a grassy embankment down below ... the situation was so grave, the flames around me were building up so rapidly.”
‘The Tsunami of Pain Washed Over Me’
About 300 feet above ground level, Hull fell back on a lesson from flight school and turned off the key to the ignition, the lights, the fuel pump, and the master switch. While looking left and right to check for traffic and hazards, he steered the aircraft toward the ground and prepared to make his exit.“I'd already opened the left-hand canopy door, already ripped off my headset, and tossed it in the opposite foot well. I clambered through the open aperture to my left, and then onto the left wing, and I just went for it. ... I punched my hands into a prayer position above my head, feet, and knees together, and I took a big leap off the trailing edge of the back of the left-wing,” Hull said. “I landed like a sack of potatoes, feet first.”
Hull had dropped 15 feet from a plane still flying around 30 miles per hour. After hitting the ground, he fell forward and smashed his face into coarse grass. The aircraft drifted on a shallow trajectory, crash-landing some 70 feet away.
Hull said: “The noise of the explosion was indescribable, horrendous, and I got the backwash of the force. Luckily, I was outside the fire radius, but not outside of the shockwave, and that really sucked out all the air from my lungs. I lay within the vacuum of that explosion momentarily.”
“I think, fortunately, the adrenaline was able to mask the heat and the pain,” he said. “But believe me, once I landed on the ground and rolled around in the grass to smother [the fire], it was moments afterward when the tsunami of pain washed over me.”
Life Altered
Hull lay on the ground near his aircraft with a ruptured large intestine, a lacerated liver, internal bleeding, a bilateral nasal fracture, two supraorbital eye socket fractures, a fractured collarbone and clavicle, and fractured ribs. He had also sustained third- and fourth-degree burns over 63 percent of his body.“A fourth-degree burn means it’s down to the bone,” he said. “That was the life-changer.”
Hull was airlifted to Orlando Regional Health Center where he initially begged doctors to put him out of his misery. He spent his first weeks in a drug-induced coma, and five months in total under 24/7 care at a cost of some 2.6 million U.S. dollars, claiming he was lucky to have had comprehensive medical insurance.
The pilot was repatriated and spent a further 18 months in various burns units. Hull said that the first time he looked at himself in the mirror after the accident, he was he terrified.
“It was a hideous sight for me to sort of process and behold,” Hull said.
Hull was in a very dark place during this time and had begun to talk to Dignitas in Switzerland as he needed help. Soon, he went for surgery with his burn consultant and that gave him a sliver of hope. Hull had to relearn to walk, feed himself, and write.
He eventually underwent 62 reconstructive surgeries under general anesthetic and spent a year at home being cared for by his mother and district nurses.
“The physical healing [took] about three years. But I would say in the cognitive sense, the acceptance probably took five years,” he told The Epoch Times. “I grieved the old me, the former, perhaps slightly more handsome me. ... I suffered that loss of identity and the self that I represented. Also, the fact that I lost my career, I couldn’t soldier anymore, there’s never going to be that same level of fitness.”
During this period, Hull tried to speak to his friends and family which he admits helped him to a certain degree.
“But ultimately, the acceptance and the decision to move forward can only come from the subject, the individual, or the victim themselves,” he said.
‘It’s Not a Sob Story’
Hull recalls that while training with Exercise Cambrian Patrol during his military years, a 48-hour, 40-mile course that sends troops across the rugged, boggy Cambrian mountainscape of central Wales, he learned the depth of his endurance.“It’s miserable, it’s uncomfortable, it’s wet, it’s damp, it’s very boggy underfoot, and you have to carry these big loads on your back,” he said. “You’re learning what it is to become a very competent soldier under great duress. ... It was during these such events that I learned that actually, there’s something within me that really starts to switch on when the going gets tough.”
Having overcome massive odds to be where he is today, Hull is now a professional keynote speaker for schools, corporations, and everything in between. He is a long-term ambassador for the U.K.-based veterans’ charity, Help for Heroes, and has regained an active, adventurous lifestyle.
Hull is also a qualified mountain guide and senior-rated diving instructor who has taught diving in Jamaica, Egypt, the Philippines, Australia, Norway, and Thailand. He has represented the U.K. in the Invictus Games, runs the London Marathon, and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for military charities.
Additionally, he has also completed the New York Marathon and the world’s toughest endurance cycling challenge: Race Across America (RAAM) in 2012, as part of an 8-man team of U.K. injured veterans.
This year, Hull is taking part in a 4-day 200 km Nijmegen march in the Netherlands, admitting he “must be a crazy guy” but that “it’s only through challenge against adversity that we truly experience what it is to be human.”
“Yes, I was a victim. But it’s not a sob story,” he told The Epoch Times. “Now, life for me is definitely worth living, and that would be my message to everybody, anybody, that may be going through difficulty or adversity in some shape or form. It’s definitely worth the fight. ... In the summer of 2007, I honestly did not believe that I was going to come through. I’m highly blessed to still be here.”
