John Travolta Reflects on Near-Death Experience Flying a Plane: I Thought I Was ‘Going to Die’

John Travolta opens up about the plane crash that left him thinking he was “going to die.”

While attending the London premiere of the Disney+ short film Shepherd — which is about a Royal Air Force pilot who suffers a total electrical failure — the Oscar winner, 69, talked about how he himself previously “experienced a total electrical failure” while piloting a plane, according to Variety .

“I actually had a complete electrical failure, not in the Vampire, but in a corporate jet over Washington,” said Travolta, who holds his own pilot’s license. “When I read [Frederick Forsyth’s book of the same name]it resonated even more because of this experience I had personally.”

“I knew what it felt like to absolutely think you were going to die,” he added. “I had two good jet engines, but no instruments, no electrics, nothing. And I thought it was over.”

John Travolta filmed in 2019.

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In 1995 The New Yorker Travolta described flying with his family when he made an emergency landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. He then explained that his “probe rectifier” had malfunctioned during the flight.

Report from The Washington Post later noted that investigators concluded “the threat of a midair collision was very real” during the 1992 flight. The report added that a Boeing 727 en route to New York was the second plane involved in the near miss.

“And then miraculously we descended according to the rules to a lower altitude,” Travola recalled in a Q&A this week. “I saw that monument in Washington DC and identified that Washington National Airport was right next to it, and I landed just like [pilot Freddie Hooke] works in a movie.”

The actor added that his co-star Ben Radcliffe, who plays Hooke, “caught that despair when you think you’re actually going to die.”

I had my family on the plane and I said ‘That’s it, I can’t believe I’m going to die on this plane,’” Travolta said.

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The Fat the star also revealed during the event that he “instantly fell in love” with Forsyth’s book when he first read it, but never got around to doing anything with the screen rights at the time. “Because it was right after ‘Pulp Fiction,’ I was doing one movie after another,” he said. “After 10 years, I just let it go and decided I was never going to do it for real.”

Eventually, when writer-director Iain Softley connected with him, the two wanted to make the project happen. “There are very few projects I’ve ever been involved in that were locked up here,” Travolta said of his heart, per Diversity. “I wanted to have a destiny with it for 30 years.”

“It took 30 years, but here I am tonight. But 30 years for me, I dreamed that we would finish this book because I’ve never seen anything like it,” he added.

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Source: HIS Education