Soaring taxi makes perfect landing

I bet you wish you could drive like this and live to tell about it!!!



BY DANIEL WAGNER
NEWSDAY


March 17, 2007, 10:00 PM EDT

Daniel Kocis remembers just what he was thinking in the back seat of a yellow cab when it hit a patch of ice Saturday on a Long Island Expressway overpass in Islandia.

"I said, 'All right, we'll spin out. No big deal,'" Kocis said. "'We're going to hit the guardrail and bounce off.'"

The cab didn't hit the rail. It pitched over it, flipping end over end before landing 30 feet below on the westbound shoulder of Veterans Memorial Highway. On its tires.

For a moment, Kocis said, he didn't even realize what had happened and "thought I was still on the LIE."

Kocis, 55, of Manorville, and driver Victor Frank, 40, of Woodside, escaped serious injury, police said.

"God loved us today," Kocis said. "It could have landed the other way."

Kocis, who has his own financial services consulting firm, had arrived at Kennedy Airport at 5:30 a.m. after a week spent working in Costa Mesa, Calif., only to find his regular limo driver unwilling to brave the remnants of Friday's storm.

He said he counted himself lucky to find a cab willing to take him all the way to Manorville, near the eastern terminus of the LIE. And for the first 40 miles or so, the ride went fine, with Kocis resting in the back while Frank drove carefully and within the speed limit, Kocis said.

Then, the moment the car hit the bridge over Veterans Memorial Highway at Exit 57 at 7:57 a.m., it went into a full, 360-degree spin. Then the Ford Crown Victoria flipped off the overpass and "miraculously" landed on its tires, Kocis said.

Kocis was able to kick the door open and free himself from the car, he said, and Frank was able to walk away after being rescued with the Jaws of Life.

Frank was admitted to Southside Hospital in Bay Shore in stable condition, while Kocis was discharged after routine tests and exams, a hospital spokesman said.

Kocis said he was especially impressed with the first responders, who had several police cars and ambulances and a fire unit on the scene "in two, three minutes," before he had even regained his bearings.

Although he was shaken from his hours of travel and the harrowing experience, and there remained significant pain in his shoulder and from what the hospital staff told him was a bruised rib, Kocis was surprised to make it home in the first place.

Things had gotten interesting Friday night at the Long Beach airport in California, when he learned that JetBlue had canceled most of its flights that day. Having spent 14 hours at his gate in Kennedy during the airline's Valentine's Day fiasco, he didn't think he'd be flying at all.

Kocis -- who said he already was religious -- said yesterday's fortuitous fall wouldn't force any changes in his life.

"It was man's doing, the random error, and God fixing it for us," he said.

But he said the moral of the story was more concrete: "When they say the bridge freezes over before the road, you better believe it."
 
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