Britt Jones
A man who was dubbed the ‘youngest survivor’ of a 1985 plane crash, which killed 137 people, recalled the moment he knew the plane would crash.
Richard Laver was twelve years old when he was due to fly on the Delta 191 flight to San Diego to participate in a junior tennis match.
His father, Ian Laver, was his tennis coach and the pair were about to embark on a trip together that day.
But Richard knew something that others didn’t - he had an overwhelming feeling two days before he boarded the plane that it was going to come down.
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He told people that he began having dreams of the plane crashing and even told his mom that ‘It’s not only a bad feeling. I know it’s going to crash’ but was dismissed and told that it’s a ‘one in a million chance’ that it could happen.
But it was after he and his father boarded the plane and it was flying over Dallas at the halfway mark of their journey that he looked out of the window and noticed a storm cell - an air mass that contains up and down drafts in convective loops.
He explained that it was a foreboding sight which led him to feel as though the ‘world started so slow down’.
He said: “I felt that something could be wrong. I went to the bathroom and threw water on my face, and I looked in the mirror and I knew — right then — that the plane was going to crash. I knew it.”
At that point, he heard an ‘internal voice’ tell him to keep his seatbelt off, which he listened to.
It was this advice that may have saved his life.
At that moment, the plane would drop out of the sky, having hit a wind shear due to a microburst in the storm.
Richard said it ‘felt like an elevator dropping from the hundredth floor to the first’ when the plane fell and that everyone on board was screaming as the plane crashed into several water towers before ‘being consumed by an explosion like a mushroom cloud’.
During the explosion, Richard was thrown from the plane at 300mph where he landed in a nearby field, unable to talk or move due to his injuries.
He said he remembered that his face was burned and that as the storm rained down on him, he had to spit water out as it began to pool around him.
That’s when a truck driver stopped at the scene and pulled him out of the water, telling him: “You're going to be OK, son.”
After being helicoptered to Parkland Memorial’s burn unit, he recalled that all throughout the halls of the unit were other survivors of the plane crash, who were screaming due to their severe burns.
But it was when his mom came into the room that he spoke words that she had told him two days prior to the crash: “How about that one-in-a-million chance?”
After the ordeal, Richard was crippled by PTSD, anxiety and depression, living on a beach for 40 days as he wasn’t sure what his purpose in life was.
It was only when he met his wife, Michelle, that it all started to fall into place and they went on to have a daughter named Katie.
Born with cerebral palsy and an intolerance to dairy, Richard invented a plant-based baby formula called ‘Kate Farms’ which helped his daughter regain her weight and become a healthy baby.
Now, he runs his business and a clean-energy drink shop called Lucky Energy.