Jason Elam

"Piloting is a lot about situational awareness and just making decisions," Elam said Thursday in discussing the Lidle accident, "and trying to be as conservative as possible. I'm hesitant to speculate about anything until I know more about what happened, but it looked like it was a pretty unusual thing to happen."

Elam made some money shooting a commercial after graduating from the University of Hawaii in 1992. He used it to take flying lessons. He first became interested in flying growing up near an Air Force base in Florida. Many of his father's friends were pilots.

"I've taken risks," he said. "But I've tried not to do completely stupid things. I'll fly low over pastures and stuff like that. I don't fly through downtown cities in between buildings and stuff. I don't know exactly what was going on. I'd like to read more and see what happened.

"I've had one problem that could have been potentially fatal, and fortunately I had enough time to do something and I was over an area where I could put it down. That's always what you're thinking when the engine is running perfectly. You're always thinking, 'What do I do, what do I do (if)?' That's all your training is. Flying an airplane is easy."

Elam said his one incident occurred when he was flying in Alaska. He lost an engine but was able to land his plane on a beach.

"It makes me wonder what actually happened because airplanes just don't fall out of the sky," he said of the Lidle crash. "Something was going on there. I hate to even speculate, because there are so many things that could have happened there.

"When I first started taking lessons, I'd read the NTSB reports on incidents and accidents, and I'd be like, 'Wow, I hope that never happens to me.' And then the more I was flying, the more I was like, 'That wasn't very smart.' "

At one time Elam, 36, even thought about becoming a professional pilot after his kicking days, but has dropped those plans because he doesn't want to spend that much time away from his wife and four children. So far, he said, the Broncos have not told him to stay grounded.

Paragraph 3 of the standard NFL players contract warns about participating in potentially dangerous off-the-field activities. But teams really can't prohibit a player from doing something risky, as long as it is legal. But they can stop his pay if he is injured in such an endeavor.