Crashes Can’t Keep This Aerobatic Pilot Down

For almost a decade, aerobatic pilot Jim Coombes has thrilled audiences with carefully choreographed stunts.

His glistening biplane spins, dives, then plummets in a nose-first spiral. He flies upside down through fiery explosions in his “Valley of Fire” show finale.

Yet, his most dramatic moment came last month as he was flying his Staudacher S-260 home from a show.

His plane crashed on the hillside of Mullan Pass. His leg broken, his face shattered and bleeding, his forehead caved in, he managed to drag himself to Interstate 90 for help.

He lived to tell the story. It wasn’t the first time.

Two years earlier, Coombes survived another crash when his propeller sheared off his plane while he was practicing maneuvers near his Nine Mile home.

Rescuers found him standing next to the biplane, assessing the damage.

“I feel like the most blessed person in the world,” Coombes said this week, sitting in his living room, energetic, optimistic, and ready to fly again. If only the leg would hurry and heal.

“I think I’ve been left on this earth for a reason - but I have no idea what it is,” he said.

As co-owner of Airshows Northwest, Coombes and his partner Merrell Stone blend stunt flying with pyrotechnics - fireworks. They’ve taken part in air shows from Alaska to Mexico, and in the eastern United States.

“Each year we try to improve the act, add a little more pizzaz,” said Coombes.

“I’m an entertainer, I want to thrill people, not scare them,” he added.

A skilled aerobatic pilot, with more than 3,500 hours of flying time, he has a healthy respect for the limits of machinery, and the human body.

He practices stunts until he can do them in his dreams. And he knows, if something can go wrong, it will.

“Be prepared, Murphy is out there,” he said.

In his latest narrow escape, Coombes, 57, was returning home from an air show in Waterloo, Iowa.

In no particular rush, he planned to take his time. His last stop before the crash was Helena.

He was passing over Missoula, keeping a close eye on the weather. It looked good. He pressed ahead.

Suddenly, as he neared Mullan Pass, he glimpsed “a wall of weather.” Unwilling to risk a storm, he decided to head back to Missoula and wait it out.

He made a hard, cornering turn, and suddenly all he could see was a wall of trees.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I want to go back there and take a look, analyze what happened, what I did.”

“I heard an explosive impact. I never quit flying the plane,” he said. “I was alert, I realized I wasn’t getting hurt.”

Then suddenly it was silent.

There was an extra tank of fuel in the front seat. He was sitting behind it. Coombes thinks the tank may have provided a barrier and saved his life when the plane’s nose disintegrated.

He was also wearing a five-point harness than held him securely in the plane.

“My only thought was to get away from the wreckage. I didn’t want to burn up with the plane.”

He marvels that there was no explosion.

“Not a spark,” he said.

Then he realized he couldn’t see. The front of his head had been crushed on impact.

“My left leg was useless,” he said.

“I crawled out of the plane and dragged myself down to I-90. I was hurting.”

Coombes is still trying to contact the woman who stopped to help him as he laid bleeding on the side of the highway.

The Shoshone County Sheriff’s Department lists the good Samaritan as Esther Potter of Colville. Coombes has a phone number, but it’s for a pager, and no one has returned his call.

She gave him a compress and he held it over his face.

“I knew I had done all I could for myself. From that point on, all I could do was keep surviving,” he said.

He was stabilized at Silver Valley Medical Center. His wife was called and she rushed to his side.

It was her worst nightmare come true.

“The sheriff called me at my office,” said Terry Coombes, who works in the School of Business at Gonzaga University.

“The sheriff was kind and reassured me that Jim was stable, that I could get there and see him.”

Jim Coombes has loved aviation and airplanes all his life. He grew up in Burbank, Calif., where his dad worked for Lockheed, manufacturing massive warbirds.

Not-quite-perfect eyesight kept him from flying military planes while in the Air Force, but it didn’t stop him from learning to fly light aircraft on his days off.

He flew for the first time in the late 1950s at Clark air base in the Philippines.

He met and married his wife soon after, but she was never pleased with his passion for planes.

Then he started stunt flying.

“I objected to it. But I know he loves to fly,” she said. “But this is crazy, crazy.

“I let him go and I say a lot of prayers.”

After the latest crash, he promised his wife he wouldn’t perform death-defying stunts in air shows.

“But I’m not giving up aviation,” he said, firmly.

It was prayers and a talented surgical team at Deaconess Medical Center that put Coombes back together again.

Dr. Robert Steadman, an oral and maxial-facial surgeon and James Perry, an orthopedic surgeon, each worked for hours.

“He had very significant injuries,” said Steadman.

His forehead was crushed, he had broken the supporting bones around his eyes, the sockets. His nose was broken loose of his skull.

Almost two dozen tiny titanium plates and 53 screws were used to rebuild his face.

The surgery lasted seven hours.

“He was very lucky he didn’t have any brain damage from the injury,” said Steadman.

There are some tiny scars near his eyes, invisible when he has his glasses on. Other scars are hidden under an eyebrow, behind his ears. Even his hair has just about grown back.

“The surgeon did an incredible job,” said Terry Coombes. “The scarring is well healed.”

Two of his three children rushed to his side. Another will come home in a couple of weeks and plans to return with his dad to the crash site to piece together the accident.

“My daughter, all my children, were so supportive during this,” he said.

Coombes is already starting to think about what he wants to do next. He plans to continue working with air shows, if not actually performing, then planning and staging them.

“I feel strongly that there are young people out there to channel into aviation,” said Coombes. “A young person may see an air show, and decide they want to go into aviation. Something they might want to do for the rest of their life.

“You don’t inspire people by doing something boring,” he said.

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