COURTESY OF THE RATCLIFF FAMILY
Dallas and Catherine Ratcliff stand on their hotel room balcony just days before Sunday's crash of their tour plane, which critically injured them both.
Plane crash ends
couple’s dream
vacationThe Ohio residents are now
recovering from burns
at Straub
During their first 19 years together, Dallas and Catherine Ratcliff kept their vacations close to home, choosing to drive rather than fly and reasoning their thrift would pay off later.
For their 20th wedding anniversary, the Ohio couple decided to splurge.
So they spent their life savings on a two-week stay in the islands, complete with rooms in beachfront hotels and prime seats on whale-watching boats.
On the last day of their trip, the two decided to "squeeze in one more adventure" and see the Big Island by air, said Catherine Ratcliff's daughter Jacqui Murphy.
"We're getting ready to go sightseeing," Dallas Ratcliff told his stepdaughter by cell phone as he was boarding the aircraft, "and we got a young, pretty pilot."
Less than three hours after takeoff, at about 4:30 p.m. Sunday, the couple's chartered single-engine tour plane crashed on a lava field near Milolii.
The Ratcliffs and their pilot, Jelica Matic, all suffered serious burns in the accident.
Dallas Ratcliff, 61, has burns to more than 40 percent of his body, his family said. Ratcliff's 63-year-old wife received burns all over her body and is battling pneumonia.
The two now lie in adjacent rooms at Straub Clinic & Hospital's intensive care unit.
"Thank God they're alive," Murphy said yesterday as she sat with two aunts at a Straub waiting room, "but we still need prayer. We all know it's a miracle (they're) here."
Catherine Ratcliff's four adult kids and Dallas' two children arrived in the islands earlier this week, along with other relatives, from the mainland.
"We will not leave until they leave," Murphy said as she pulled out a photo of the couple, taken just days before the accident, wearing aloha attire and standing in front of a calm Pacific shore. "They shouldn't be here and they are."
Murphy and her brother Rick Wilson will fly over the Big Island crash site tomorrow "to see what the terrain looked like," she said.
"I just need to see it for myself," Murphy said, adding that Wilson paid extra for a twin-engine plane.
Matic, of the Big-Island based Island Hoppers tour company, was listed in serious condition at the Queen's Medical Center.
National Transportation Safety Board officials hope to speak to Matic today about the accident, before wrapping up their investigation. Investigator Clint Johnson said the plane's wreckage will likely be transported to a Kona hangar next week.
On Wednesday the NTSB spoke to Island Hoppers President Phil Auldridge about the crash, as well as the company's chief pilots and other pilots.
Earlier this week, Auldridge released a statement blaming the crash on an "extreme downdraft," which is similar to a localized cyclone. Investigators have not confirmed the alleged cause.
At the hospital yesterday, Catherine Ratcliff's sisters, Donna Essman and Ann Hamilton, said the Ratcliffs always put others first.
"Dallas highlights Bibles and hands them out to people," Essman said with a laugh. "Everybody loves them ... (and) we want as many prayers out there as we can possibly get."
