Lucky to be alive. American Idol alum Taylor Hicks revealed in a new interview that his private plane nearly crashed on Wednesday, October 26, after one of its engines blew out.
The silver-haired singer, 40, who won the fifth season of the Fox singing competition in May 2006, opened up to TMZ about the terrifying experience.
“I’m asleep in the copilot chair and I wake up to this muttering sound and I knew that the pilot was going to descend,” he recounted to the site of his flight from Tennessee to Alabama. “And as soon as we descended to about 7,000 feet, two of the pistons blew, oil went everywhere and the engine stopped and the rotor blade stopped in midair.”
The “Do I Make You Proud” crooner said he felt completely powerless in the moment and credits his survival to the talented pilot navigating the tiny propeller jet.
“And I looked over and I just thought to myself, What can you do? You’re absolutely helpless in this situation because, you know, we lost a complete engine. Luckily, I was on a twin-engine private aircraft. And I just felt like my life and all of our lives kind of flashed before our eyes a little bit,” he continued. “And we were just very thankful and very blessed that we had a wonderful, graceful, amazing pilot that was able to handle this situation, and it was literally unbelievable how he sat that plane down from going from two engines to one engine.”
Hicks — who released his last studio album, The Distance, in 2009 — added: “It was literally something out of a movie.”
