
Approximately 40 years ago, Herb was involved in a plane crash that was found to be the fault of the other pilot, whose plane came too close to the plane Herb was in. Two people died in the crash. Herb says he walked away without a scratch.
"We were about 600 miles east of Hawaii," Herb says. "We were coming back from Japan and conducting routine flight operations. The pilots of the two planes knew each other and the other plane came up alongside us to wave. The pilot and co-pilot in the other plane switched seats and the pilot picked up a camera to take pictures. They moved too close to us and our propellor chopped his tail off. He ripped off our left engine, but we recovered after a few hundred feet.
"I was apprehensive about flying again because the accident was fresh in my mind, but I did continue to fly. I flew in everything they [the Navy] would let me fly in.
READ MORE PLANE CRASH LEGAL NEWS
Despite planes being more reliable today than they were before, accidents still happen and they are often tragic. Most common are small plane crashes, in which one or two people are killed. Those crashes rarely make national news and often go unnoticed outside of the region they occur in. But that does not make them any less devastating to the families of the people involved. Furthermore, no matter how good technology becomes, there is still a chance that human error, either in the plane or during maintenance, will cause an accident.