Frankie & Ray

Ray was commended honours from the Queen for saving the life of fellow passenger, Frankie Dettori.

On Thursday. 1st June, 2000, at Newmarket, at about 12.25 pm, a twin-engined Piper Seneca, bound for Goodwood, prepared to depart.

The two passengers were jockeys Frankie Dettori and Ray Cochrane. Patrick Mackey, the pilot, warned them both to buckle up for a bumpy ride.

Frankie was 29. He had been champion jockey three times. Ray was nearly 43. He had ridden nearly 1500 winners, including the Derby and two other classics.

Frankie hadn’t wanted to travel alone. He asked Richard Hills and John Ferguson if they fancied a lift, but both declined. Then he rang Ray, who would normally have travelled the 140 miles by motorbike. It was grey, wet and windy, a nasty day.

At take-off a bang was heard. The plane made it to about 100 feet, before tilting 90 degrees. The starboard engine was on fire. Patrick was fighting with the controls, but there was no power. They were going down.

In the seconds before impact Frankie knew he was going to die.

What I felt most was disappointment. It’s stupid. I’m in perfect health. I’m one of the best in the world at what I do. All about to be wiped out so close to home I can practically see my front door.

Patrick somehow hauled the plane over Devil’s Dyke, a raised mound between the two racecourses. It was a crucial manoeuvre. Hitting the dyke nose first would have been the end. A wing clipped the ground. The aircraft cartwheeled. Frankie remembers screams and scraping of metal. He saw Patrick, certainly unconscious and possibly dead, slumped over the controls, but it was dreamlike. Then Ray punched him.

‘Get out, Frankie’, he shouted. But Frankie couldn’t move. Ray kicked open the baggage door and pushed Frankie through it. The plane was burning, about to explode. Ray dragged Frankie thirty yards away, then went back for Patrick.

I can see flames. Ray doesn’t care. He’s insanely brave. He forces open the pilot’s door and leans in … a ball of fire spirals up, knocking Ray back. He struggles to the other side of the plane to have another go.

A racecourse worker has appeared and is shouting at Ray to get away. Ray doesn’t care. He rips off his jacket and beats at the flames, but there is no way anyone is getting in there.

Patrick’s gone. Ray is hammering on the side of the plane and screaming at the heavens.

….

It took Frankie two months to physically recover; mentally it was a different matter. He doesn’t mention survivor guilt but admits, in his autobiography, that he wonders why he lived when Patrick didn’t.

I didn’t see a therapist. I’m Italian.

Ray also recovered, but it wasn’t the same. He had a badly injured head and neck. Riding was painful.

Frankie said: ‘Ray, why don’t you pack it in and be my agent? No-one knows the racing game like you’.

That job lasted for 20 years.

If he hadn’t first kicked me out of the plane and then dragged me away, I’d have been caught up in the fireball and burned to death. We never talk about it. He handles it his way and I handle it mine. In any case, what’s there to talk about? You saved my life mate - thanks? He knows how grateful I am. It’s something we share.

In 2002 Ray, an Irishman, accepted the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery.