You know, he told himself, if you eject from this airplane, you will never be able to drink with the guys in the bar again. You owe it to yourself to try and get it out. You always do.

When a pilot breaks a stall, he puts the stick all the way forward in order to pick up airspeed, and that way get some control surfaces working for him.

Horner did that, then tried to bring the nose up . . . and nothing happened.

Meanwhile, all he could see was ground screaming up at him, surrounding him, all about him. It was too late to punch out with the ejection seat. And nothing he had done was bringing the plane under control.

At that moment, he went through the death experience. I’m going to die, he said to himself. There is no way an airplane will recover from this shit. It’s not capable of doing it. I’m going to die out here in the shitty, nowhere desert, splattered like roadkill on the ground, and I’m not going to get out of this.

Two things happened then, both of them a normal consequence of the sudden onset of adrenaline pumping through one’s system as death nears:

First, outrage. He was filled with fury that his wife, Mary Jo, was pregnant with their first child and he would never see it. Second, time slowed. The fire pulse—the adrenaline—was pushing him to high speed. The data in his head was spinning through like mad. Even so, he was preternaturally calm. It was like one of those old science fiction stories, in which somebody takes a potion that speeds time up. An hour in speeded-up time is a second in the world’s time.

There he was, not far from the ground, certain he was about to die, feeling simultaneous outrage at dying and absolute peace and surrender, and time had slowed to a near stop. He had never felt so calm and serene in his life.

Somewhere in this timelessness, he somehow rose out of the top of his head and was suspended there, looking down at himself, sitting in the cockpit. As he stared down at himself, he thought, What can I do to get out of this? I don’t really want to die here.

Meanwhile, the airplane was sinking to the ground, at something like 150 to 200 miles an hour. He tried again to pull the nose up, but the nose rose only a little bit, an inch at a time. He was still going to hit the ground.