‘Why am I still here?’

Three years to the day after the event that changed her life, Robin Bonnist sat on a bench outside the Martha’s Vineyard Airport’s General Aviation building facing the tarmac. 

Engraved on the black bench are the words, “In loving memory, Randolph Martin Bonnist, gone flying into the Mystic. 7/15/2023.” 

The site, which honors Bonnist’s late husband, served as a place for Bonnist and her editor, Jan Winburn, to reflect on the story that dramatically altered the flight path of her life, and the basis of the memoir she is writing.

It was one of those moments the Island will never forget: Bonnist crash-landed a plane at Martha’s Vineyard Airport (MVY) after her husband, the pilot, suffered a medical emergency midflight on their way to visit family in Aquinnah. 

In a flood of national media coverage, Robin Bonnist was celebrated as a hero and a survivor, and is widely considered a total “bada__” for the way she kept her calm. While the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) might classify her as “survivor,” the pink beaded friendship bracelet gifted to her by a Boston nurse working in the cardiac-care unit spells out that more scrappy and popular distinction; it was the second time a medical professional called her that after the incident.

“She told me that she had worked the Boston Marathon bombing, and that someone had given her a bracelet that said ‘Bada__,’” Bonnist said. “It’s a little treasure for me, and someday I plan on passing it along to somebody else. But right now, I still need it.”

Her husband, Randolph (“Randy”) Bonnist,” was 79 on July 15, 2023, when he began experiencing a medical emergency while flying a Piper Meridian turboprop six-seat plane to Martha’s Vineyard Airport from Westchester, N.Y. 

Suddenly alone in the copilot seat and without a pilot’s license, Bonnist recalled how Randy set her up for a “go-around” — aborting a landing attempt and climbing back into the sky for another attempt — in his last conscious moments. 

“He lifted the [landing] gear, retracted the gear, added power, and blacked out. We were about 300 feet above the ground, and there was no more runway,” she said, adding that he had also consciously set the yoke – or primary control to steer the aircraft – for landing. “He knew that would save my life and give me a chance,” she explained.

Three years later, Bonnist has drafted her memoir about that harrowing day and its aftermath. The working title is “Gone Flying: Love, Loss, Landing,” and the manuscript’s name serves to emphasize the sudden and unexpected nature of her husband’s death. This past July, Bonnist pitched her story at Islanders Write, a literary event put on by The Martha’s Vineyard Times, and now, she said, the writing project is taking off.

“The title of the book is ‘Gone Flying’ because it’s just like, poof, he was gone, just like that. Right before my eyes, and he never came back,” she said. “I also knew my husband wasn’t a healthy person. I write about regrets, and the things I don’t regret, and the things I should have known.”

Bonnist told The Times about some of the details of the final approach to the airport. She said she had to navigate around an overhanging squall during the landing, and also couldn’t use the plane’s radio to communicate with the air traffic control tower due to Randy’s bodyweight leaning on her. After circling in the sky while debating between landing the plane in the ocean or forest, she ultimately chose to land at the airport.

“The plane was so heavy because of this tremendous jet engine that was just pulling back and fighting the airplane,” she said. “Finally, I didn’t have the strength anymore. So I said, ‘Here we go, head for this field. Whatever happens, happens.’”

Following the crash, Randy was transported to Martha’s Vineyard Hospital (MVH). While at MVH, Bonnist had an interaction with an ER nurse in pink scrubs that would change how she perceives herself after the crash. 

“This one woman among all the staff in the emergency room walks up to me, and she says, ‘I just want you to know, we all think you’re a badass,’” Bonnist said. “Those words made such a tremendous difference in my life, because they turned the whole situation around from being a survivor of an airplane crash … and becoming someone that hadn’t killed anyone else that day.”

Bonnist left a care package on a desk in the emergency room at MVH in the hopes of finding the individual, but wasn’t successful. Years later, Bonnist said that she would still like to identify her.

Shortly after the crash, Bonnist said she began to document her story to deal with her post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“I started to write immediately, because it felt like I had to get this story. There was so much pain … pain to paper or pen to paper,” she said. 

But Bonnist said that she still needed to find a way to move on. “The writing was helping me, but it was almost as if you tell the same story over and over, and it doesn’t move forward,” she said.

Listening to an NPR interview with Dr. Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist specializing in treating PTSD, catalyzed Bonnist’s recovery journey. After purchasing Javanbakht’s book, “Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety,” she reached out to the psychiatrist’s team.

When Bonnist sent the team newsreels depicting the plane crash, Javanbakt agreed to meet with her over Zoom. She said that he played an indispensable role in her PTSD recovery.

Along with fact-checking the aspects of Bonnist’s manuscript that concerned PTSD, Javanbakht recommended exposure therapy, which included advice for Bonnist to fly on an airline in September 2024 to say goodbye to her dying mother in Florida, and to revisit the VIneyard airport to dedicate a memorial bench to Randy on the one-year anniversary of the accident.

On that visit, Bonnist had MVY Airport Director Geoff Freeman take her to the air traffic control tower to meet an employee who put her in touch with the controller on duty at the time of the crash.. Bonnist said it was this interaction that compelled her to make her writings into a memoir.

MVY Fuel Supervisor Eric Hatt, who had also been on the scene fueling an airline jet at the time of the crash in 2023, said Bonnist’s levelheadedness and consideration for others deserves recognition.

“Here she is taking control of the airplane, and she has enough presence of mind to try to steer it away from where all the other airplanes and people were. I was blown away,” Hatt said. “She was so nice and calm, and she was more concerned about everybody else.”

In her memoir, Bonnist incorporated records from the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration. Despite setbacks, like waiting two years to obtain recordings of the transmissions from the MVY tower during the crash, Bonnist was determined to investigate the accident herself: “[Investigating] made me feel less of a survivor. It made me feel like I had some control over how this story gets told, because if I died that day, there would be no story.”

After Bonnist read the opening of her manuscript at a workshop held by Nancy Slonim Aronie, a writer on the Island and columnist for The Times, Aronie referred her to Winburn, whom she then sat with this past July, on the bench at MVY, to help with further editing. Winburn, whose brother died in an airplane crash in 1977, encouraged Bonnist to submit her manuscript to the Islanders Write Pitch Panel, a literary event sponsored by The Times in which selected writers deliver book pitches to a panel of publishing professionals.

Coincidentally, the pitch took place on the third anniversary of the crash. Bonnist emphasized the emotional heaviness she felt during her pitch. “It was intense,” she said. “It was very meaningful to be taken, because when you’ve written a manuscript like this, it’s very close to your heart. It’s almost like revealing mistakes that you’ve made in your life, tragedy that you’ve endured, loss and grief.”

Ultimately, Bonnist said that the driving question behind her memoir is why she survived the crash. Interestingly, she said, the answer was to write her book. “My life has been totally devoted to telling this story and finding a reason,” Bonnist said. “Getting the memoir out to other people is my way of giving back.”

Editor’s note: Updated to correct a few inaccuracies about how Randy set up Robin in the plane, that Robin wasn’t medevaced to Boston, and that Robin didn’t meet the controller on duty in July 2023.