BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — This is terror: 20,000 feet in the air, pilot unconscious, the cold, vast Pacific Ocean dead ahead and nowhere to turn for help except to the increasingly faint, disembodied voices of strangers.
The riveting drama, which made national news, reached its heart-pounding climax in the sky over Bakersfield one year ago when a passenger aboard a small private plane was forced to take over after her pilot husband suffered a fatal heart attack. If she was going to survive, it would take an army of aviators working in tandem.
Yvonne Alper and her husband Eliot had been married eight months, but were still very much of that newlywed mindset in October 2024. Their weekends together were adventures, and with his pilot’s license Eliot was able to turn a lot of them into mini-honeymoons.
Except their idea of a mini-honeymoon was different from what a lot of people might envision. They were runners, cyclists and especially triathletes who flew all over the country to compete – swimming, biking and then running – in that challenging test of fitness and endurance.
Aircraft makes emergency landing at Meadows Field Airport: KCFD
That was the plan that October morning in 2024. Eliot Alper, a 78-year-old scuba diver, mountain climber, Civil Air Patrol captain and real estate broker, and his wife Yvonne Alper-Kinane-Wells, age 69, would fly his twin-turbo-prop Beechcraft King Air C90-B from the Las Vegas-area municipal airport his father Arby Alper founded 70 years ago to the Bay Area to run the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in San Jose. Eliot preferred the small airport in the seaside city of Monterey; they’d fly there, rent a car and drive 70 miles north to San Jose…