Airplane Struck Model in Head During Desert Photo Shoot

A model was struck in the head by the wing of an airplane after the pilot approached her and the photographer to offer his plane as a backdrop for the photo shoot, according to a report this week by the General Aviation News.

Warning: Some might find the below details and photos distressing.

Kelly Bertelsen was posing for photos taken by her husband Jake in a desert outside of Las Vegas in July 2023, when the airplane clipped her on the back of her head. Miraculously, the wing struck a ring Kelly was wearing which acted as a sheild.

“Because of how fast the plane was going when it hit her head, I thought she was going to be dead for sure,” Jake explained in a witness statement. He threw his camera down and ran to his wife to find her breathing but unresponsive.

Kelly was rushed to hospital and suffered a brain hemorrhage while also requiring 50 stitches to her head. But the large stone fitted to her ring, which shattered on impact, undoubtedly saved her life.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but if she wasn’t wearing that ring she wouldn’t have made it,” Jake told NBC.

Still, Kelly suffered a traumatic brain injury from the accident, and a GoFundMe page was set up to help with her recovery. But Kelly appears to have regrouped and is back modeling and tattooing.

Findings

In the report by the National Transportation Safety Board, the photographer, Jake, said the pilot approached them and offered to fly over the model for additional photos. The pilot flew over Kelly twice, but on the third flyover, the airplane was lower than on the previous passes, and the left wing struck Kelly’s head.

After the accident, Jake found similar images where the pilot had flown his plane in the background of a model shoot. He realized that the pilot “enjoyed the thrill of flying his plane dangerously close” to models. Adding that, if he had seen these previous photos, “there’s no way we would have agreed to the shoot.”

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of the accident was “the pilot’s unsafe inflight operation of the airplane and failure to maintain clearance from a person on the ground, which resulted in a serious injury.”