Pilots

In 1980 Ed Hommer was flying the Alaskan bush in a Cessna 185. On this December day he had picked up three tourists from the airport at Talkeetna, Alaska, for a round-robin trip to Denali, or Mount McKinley as it used to be called.

The flight was supposed to last an hour and a half at most, but something freakish and terrible happened. While circling America's tallest peak at 11,000 feet, a downdraft grabbed the Cessna and slammed it into the mountainside. Hommer managed to radio his position to mountain rescue, which launched an exhaustive attempt to reach the downed Cessna. Rescuers sent out two Army Chinook helicopters carrying Air Force parachute jumpers and a team of climbers from the Northern Warfare Training Center at nearby Fort Greeley. "It was a pretty big operation," the 46-year-old Hommer recalls. At that time of the year the day lasts only six hours, and it got dark quickly. Then things turned from bad to worse: A severe winter storm moved in. "They knew where we were," Hommer says, "but they couldn't get to us." They were trapped on the mountainside in sub-zero stormy weather for five days. By the time help arrived, two of the passengers had died from exposure and injuries. Hommer was in bad shape, too. His feet had frozen, and doctors in Anchorage had to amputate above the ankles.

He spent four and a half months recovering in the hospital. And he grew depressed. Hommer, after all, had always been active. In 1974 he'd joined the 82nd Airborne Division and was discharged as a sergeant in 1978; in 1975 Hommer started mountain climbing. And in 1978 he earned his pilot certificate. Now the skydiving, the mountain climbing, the flying — all that was shot down.

"I didn't know what I was going to do with my life," he recalls. "I had a wife, a kid, no job, and no feet." About 10 months after his crash, a friend brought over a gift that would change Hommer's life. It was a book titled Reach for the Sky, by Douglas Bader. Bader was a Royal Air Force pilot who seriously injured himself crashing a biplane fighter in 1931. Doctors amputated both legs — one of them above the knee. His military career was effectively over. But the RAF grew so desperate for pilots during the Battle of Britain that they put Bader in a Supermarine Spitfire, wearing his "tin legs," naturally. By 1940 "Tin Legs" Bader had owned 22 German airplanes and was in charge of his own squadron. While flying over France in 1941 he shot .own two German aircraft. His Spitfire, however, was cut in half by a German's prop. He bailed out but one of his tin feet got caught in the cockpit. He unstrapped the leg and hit the silk. On the ground the Germans caught him and, not sure what to make of the legless pilot, put him in the hospital. In a bizarre act of decency they arranged with the Brits to drop another leg for him. He strapped that one on and within 48 hours escaped the hospital. The Germans caught him and put him in a POW camp, from which he escaped several times — and was recaptured each time. Finally the Nazis locked Bader up in escape-proof Coldiz Castle, where he waited out the war.

"Literally, reading that book helped me turn my life around," explains Hommer. "It instilled in me the resolve to return to aviation." Four months later he received his medical waiver, and today he flies in the right seat of MD-80s.

But there was something more he wanted to accomplish: He wanted to summit the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. In August 2001, he and a small team set out with a 55-day permit from the Chinese government to climb the north face. Hommer would be the first footless man to reach the 29,035-foot peak. The team was delayed by weather, and they managed to reach 26,000 feet. Before they could make the final push their permits expired — and Chi.a refused to extend them. On October 15, they left the mountain. "I was disappointed, but you come away stronger and richer for the experience," he says. "That mountain's going to be there a long time — it's not going anywhere."

But he is: He's going back in the spring of 2003. Meanwhile, he's written a book on his experience titled The Hill (Rodale Press). And he says he's going to keep flying airliners until retirement.