Everyone mentioned how much fun the buzzing was and could we fly lower? They thought it was really neat to see how much faster we were going than the cars on the highway. I explained that at night it is much safer to keep your altitude because if something happened to the aircraft you may need all the time you can get to try to solve the problem or look for a suitable place to land. These words had hardly left my lips when I cut back power and began to descend from 2500 feet down to 1000 feet altitude. The area we were flying over was all relatively flat barren range land. I was pretty familiar with the area because we had lived in Cypress, Texas, for about 3 years and Cypress was just a little ways behind us now. As I leveled the plane at 1000 feet I was asked why I descended. I made up the story that it is okay now because we were far enough out of town that the traffic was sparse enough on the highway that if we had any emergency, I would merely land on the highway. This satisfied everyone. They could see things better from this lower altitude and was enjoying the flight so much that I decided to let the altitude drop on down to 500 feet above the ground. This was even better and everyone was really getting a kick out of zooming along. So again I descended lower, to what I thought was 300 feet above the ground. We could see the cars just fine and the road signs and the cattle in the fields. In the back of my mind I was thinking I would drop on down to 50 or maybe 75 feet altitude. I had flown low over the fields before, when I was practicing for my license and I knew what it was like. Only I had never done it at night, because student pilots don’t get to take the planes out much at night. One other thing I should mention, I had set the altimeter according to the field elevation back at the airport, which was 50 ft., almost two hours ago, and since that time the sun had set, and we were flying over slightly higher terrain, the mean sea level altitude of this area was probably 100 to 140 ft. These two factors together was causing a slight error on the altimeter. According to what I thought was the correct altitude we should have been about 300 feet high. But in fact we were less than 150 feet high. That is why we could see things as clearly as we did. Had I tried to go much lower, either I would have had to pick up the fact that the ground was closer than I thought, or we would have flown right into the ground. Anyhow as I am thinking I will descend just a little lower, the friend in the front seat leans forward and asks, “What’s that?”
Right at that instant I realized I still had my sun glasses on. I ripped them from my face and there before my eyes was the top of a high power transmission line. Those towers stand about 80 to 100 feet high. Because of the rising terrain, I was lower than I thought I was. We were headed right into that tangle of high voltage wire. My right hand instinctively pushed the throttle in to full power and the engine responded just fine. My left hand was bringing the control yolk as far back as quickly as it could to get that airplane climbing. We zoomed over the towers and wires just missing them. I looked out the side window and estimated we missed them by just a few feet. Had I actually descended any lower as I had been thinking earlier, there is no way that little Cessna could have climbed in time to save itself or us from a final bright flash and fireball in the night sky.
