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ARCHIBALD, La. - Parkersburg native Doug White is thankful for the help from the ground as well as from heaven, which helped him land an airplane following the mid-flight death of its pilot and save the lives of his family and himself.

"We're still in a funk," White said Tuesday. "My wife and kids are doing about as well as you could expect. It all hasn't sunk in yet. It's still almost like it didn't happen."

On Easter Sunday, they had just taken off from Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Fla., after attending the funeral of his brother Jeff, also originally from Wood County.

It was a smooth takeoff, but as the plane ascended, the pilot - Joe Cabuk, a retired Air Force pilot slumped in his chair and later died. White, who owns Western Correctional Corp., owns the plane, a twin-engine King Air, and leases it, but did not know how to fly it.

The 1970 Parkersburg High School graduate has a pilot's license but has only flown small craft. White had logged about 150 hours flying a single-engine Cessna 172 but had no experience flying the faster, larger King Air, which uses a jet engine to drive a propeller. He had also only recently began flying a Cessna again after a nearly two-decade hiatus.

White knew the plane was supposed to level off at 10,000 feet altitude, but the plane continued climbing thousands of feet higher. The highest he had ever flown a Cessna was 7,000 feet. The King Air was at twice that altitude.

As he looked at the more complex controls of the King Air, he had little idea of what did what.

"My first thought was I knew we had to stop climbing. I looked around in the cockpit, it looked to me like I was sitting in a space shuttle," he said.

Fortunately, he had prepared for such a situation. He and his family are alive because of it.

"When I was on the plane before, I asked how to use the radio, just in case something ever happened to the pilot. That's the only thing I knew how to do use the radio," he said.

"I need help," he radioed. " I need a King Air pilot to talk to. We're in trouble."

He turned to his family and told them to start praying. They did.

White tried to stay calm as he communicated with air traffic controllers in Miami and Fort Myers.

"Me and the good Lord are hand flying this niner delta whiskey," he told them.

White tried turning the autopilot back on, but it took the plane in the wrong direction. It had been programmed to fly to Jackson, Miss., where White's truck was parked.

"I hand flew it the rest of the way over the Gulf of Mexico," he said.

One of the air traffic controllers called a friend in Connecticut who was certified to fly a King Air and he used checklists, manuals and most importantly, a cockpit layout sheet. The controller relayed pertinent information to White in a calm, reassuring, matter-of-fact voice.

"I had a lot of questions. He stood by and talked to the King Air pilot. When I had a question, he gave me an answer. When nothing needed to be said, there was silence. He did an amazing job. The spouses of these air-traffic controllers have no clue what their husbands and wives do. They don't make near enough money for what they do," White said.

While White managed to keep himself calm and methodical, he was aware of the cloud of doom that hovered over the aircraft.

"When I touch down," he told air traffic control, "if I ever touch down, do I just kill the throttle or what?

"That's correct," the controller said in a smooth, calm voice. "When you touch down, just slowly kill the throttle."

White saved any outward sign of emotion until the plane touched down safely on the runway, when he let out a heart-felt "thank you" to the controller. Even then, however, he continued to keep his wits about him. Instead of leaving the plane in the middle of the runway, he taxied off the runway near waiting EMTs, who were unable to revive the pilot.

White has tried to ignore the attention as much as possible and hopes the national attention will blow over soon.

"We're still getting inundated with news crews, TV shows, and I keep getting calls from people like Oprah and the Good Morning shows. I'm hoping that Obama will do something stupid in the next day or two so this story won't have legs anyway," he said, jokingly.

White said he hopes news of his experience won't make anyone afraid to fly.

"Flying didn't have anything to do with what happened. Imagine if we were driving on Interstate 77 and the driver died. We'd be over a guardrail in Ripley," he said.