WTLV First Coast News
JACKSONVILLE, Florida (WTLV) -- Pilot
Graham Hill was just looking for a good view of the downtown fireworks
when he took his girlfriend for a New Year's Eve flight over downtown
Jacksonville. Instead, he was met by gunfire.
"We were just north
of the football stadium, at 1,200 feet when there was a loud pop.
...And that's when I noticed the bullet hole. And so I let her know that
we had been shot at, and just when I said that I felt blood running
down my neck."
In a YouTube video,
Hill says he handed the controls to his girlfriend when he realized
he'd been shot in the head, and used his jacket to staunch the
bleeding. They landed safely at Craig Field. And he appears to have
taken the incident with a dose of good humor, even posting an X-ray as
his Facebook profile photo.
Jacksonville pilot
and flight instructor Chris Hughes, who has actually flown the plane
that was hit, heard about the incident in an online pilots' forum.
"Shocked. It's not something you would expect to really run into flying over a city like Jacksonville."
Unfortunately, the
problem of celebratory gunfire is not that rare in Jacksonville. An
8-year-old boy was shot in the foot, also on New Year's Eve, and Jacksonville police say they answered 259 calls
for discharged firearms on that day alone.
"They
know it is wrong, it is illegal, just like any other law that is
broken, they are out there doing it, they know it is not right, they
just think they are not going to get caught," JSO spokesperson Melissa Bujeda told First Coast News.
Chris Hughes still
views the shooting as a freak occurrence. But he will tell his flight
students that it's just one more thing for a pilot to be prepared for.
"At this point,
yeah, I would probably warn them, if they're flying on New Year's Eve or
any other major holiday when Americans like to shoot guns, then be
careful. That's probably what I'd warn them."
This incident has
of course gotten a lot of attention in aviation circles. But the folks
we spoke to at the FAA say the chances of it happening again are almost
infinitesimally small.