Down Around Midnight (2 page)

To a question I'm asked invariably, the question posed in first position more often than any other, the answer is that the crash came without warning. There was no time in which to be terrified or ponder the state of one's soul, to inventory the events of one's life as it passed before his or her eyes, or to calculate assets and liabilities pertaining to one's standing with God. The plane was at five thousand feet, maybe twenty-five miles southwest of Barnstable Municipal Airport in Hyannis, when the voice of the captain or maybe the first officer came over the cabin speakers with the announcement that the plane would be touching down in ten minutes; we were instructed to extinguish any cigarettes and fasten our seat belts in preparation for landing. Suzanne and I said hello, we talked for a little while, she tightened my seat belt, our conversation eventually trailed off, and we along with the other passengers retreated to the privacy of our thoughts as the aircraft descended through the final stages of the approach.

The temperature at the airport that night was sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, with a ten-knot breeze out of the southwest. Visibility on the ground was three quarters of a mile in fog and light drizzle, sky obscured, with an indefinite ceiling of two hundred feet. The moon was in its last quarter but lost to view in the weather. A glance to my left as we descended through the clouds revealed no more than my reflection in the window. The only evidence of forward progress was the occasional dip brought on by turbulence and the direction of the water streaking the glass. Beyond the window there was nothing but the black of an invisible night and the hypnotic drone of the turboprop engines, an insistent, monotonous hum to which I inevitably surrendered, slipping into that easeful state of interrupted animation familiar to anyone who has ever flown or been rocked to sleep in a cradle.

If, in those final ten minutes before facing potential death, I pondered anything at all, it would not have been the state of my soul but more likely the indignity of an empty stomach. I had arrived at LaGuardia before dinnertime as it is commonly observed in Manhattan. The flight was leaving out of the Marine Air Terminal—used to accommodate commuter airlines and as a general-aviation facility—and the only source of sustenance there was a poorly maintained candy machine, its age and condition suspiciously suggesting a shared provenance with the Art Deco building itself. Had I died, I would have died hungry. And tired. There is no one aboard an airplane in the hours that Hamlet in his madness calls “the very witching time of night” who isn't beat.

In the ten minutes following the landing announcement, there was no hint of what was to come. There was the somnolent drone of the engines, the beads of moisture scarifying the window glass, perhaps a slight increase in cabin pressure, and the prospect finally of home. Then impact. In the interval of a heartbeat. Lights out. You don't own it. I breathed in, fairly unmindful of any real sense of forward progress, and when I breathed out I was pulling six g's. Angling in at seven degrees, four degrees off the glide path, coming out of the sky at a rate of descent of 1,500 feet per minute, the airplane hit the trees at a velocity of 204 feet per second, breaking out of the cloud cover about two seconds from contact.

Time never had a chance to stand still.

 

 

Once the plane was down, Suzanne and I shared responsibility for making happen much of what happened, I because of my determination and the authority that attached to me by way of my age, she because she was uninjured, mobile, and utterly fearless. At thirty-two, I was more than ten years older than all but one person in the passenger cabin, and I had at least seven on him. I was a year older than the copilot, and he was out of commission. Only the pilot was older than I, and he was dead. Suzanne would ascend that night to a whole other level of heroics away from the site of the crash, but for now it was she and I, and what motivated me that night, more than courage or fear, was anger.

Coming around, within seconds of impact, I experienced an epiphany the violence of which remains vivid to me today. The plane had come to rest in silence. There were no ambulances, no lights or sirens, none of the scrambling you associate with an airport disaster. We had not crashed hitting the runway. No help was on its way. And in the absolute stillness of that instant, before the screaming started, I was overcome by the realization that whether I lived was up to me.

The people who operated the airline, the same people whose indifference we had suffered for an hour and a half at LaGuardia, were responsible for this, and now they were nowhere to be found, and I remember being propelled by the resolution that I wasn't going down with
their
ship.

Raising myself up off the deck, near paralyzed below the point of my fracture, I didn't do a lot of thinking. You don't really think in those circumstances; you act, or react, or you simply shut down, control of your vital processes being the ultimate prize in that physiological face-off between adrenaline and shock. In the minute or so following impact, if I was given to thoughts of anything, they were thoughts of an airplane in Chicago, an ill-fated DC-10, American Airlines Flight 191.

That airplane, bound for Los Angeles, went down after losing one of its engines on takeoff from O'Hare International, exploding in a massive fireball a mile and a half beyond the runway, taking the lives of 273 people. One of the dead was Sheldon Wax, the managing editor of
Playboy.
I had never met Wax, but as a freelance contributor, I had worked with some of his colleagues. I had known him by reputation and remembered reading his obituary. His wife, Judith, an author, had died with him, and so too had a woman named Vicki Haider, the magazine's fiction editor.

It takes only a tenuous connection, I suppose, to see in any obituary the template of one's own, and I don't know if that explains why, but for me the crash in Chicago served as the template for all aviation disasters. Imagining planes going down, I naturally imagined that one. The crash had happened only three weeks earlier, the explosion had been captured on film, and excepting the events of September 11, 2001, it remains the single worst aviation disaster in United States history.

Struggling to my feet that night, I did, if only briefly, think of that flight in Chicago. And to the extent that I did, I was thinking of fire.

“We have to get everyone out of here.”

 

 

The De Havilland DHC-6, a nineteen-passenger, twin-engine turboprop known familiarly as the Twin Otter, was one of ten owned by Boston-based Air New England, a certificated air carrier that operated a number of larger-capacity aircraft as well. The plane was fifty-two feet long with a wingspan of sixty-five feet, and there were about a thousand pounds of fuel on board when it crashed: about 145 gallons of Jet A, a commercial, kerosene-grade jet fuel, carried overhead in its wing tanks.

The silence that enveloped the aircraft in the instant after it came to rest was broken by a voice from the cockpit, by a single four-letter word from one of the crew. No urgency. No follow-up. As if he had dropped a dinner plate. Not knowing which of them was speaking, making no distinction between pilot and copilot—I knew
I
wasn't flying the plane—I thought,
Yeah, pal,
you're
upset.

A voice in the dark. Over and out. It was the first indication of life aboard until my vision cleared. A lot happened before I heard it again. The emergency lights were dim. The cabin was obscured by what appeared to be smoke, probably the dust from all the debris, and the air was choked with fumes. I couldn't see anything or anyone beyond the forward bulkhead.

The floor was running with fuel and strewn with broken cockpit glass, and there were people everywhere. There were three girls up front, arrayed in the wreckage, behind what was left of the flight deck. The three had been traveling together. The oldest was eighteen. She was unconscious. She lay within arm's reach of the youngest, who was twelve and appeared to be dead. The third was screaming: “My sisters! My sisters!” These girls were three of the four children, one child short of the entire progeny, of a mother and father in Michigan.

The three had been seated just aft of the cockpit bulkhead, the eldest on my side of the plane. Suzanne was sitting across from me about halfway back on the starboard to right. There was one male passenger sitting behind Suzanne and another, who had been seated directly in front of her, lying on the floor.

One passenger was missing.

There had been ten people aboard the plane when it crashed, they had been thrown all over the place, and now we would all finally meet one another, those of us who were alive.

The first indication of the physical trouble I was in manifested itself immediately. The pain I experienced as I tried to stand up genuinely frightened me. In order to stand, after unbuckling, I had to simultaneously pick up the passenger at my feet, the one who had been sitting in front of Suzanne. I asked if he was OK. He said he thought he had dislocated his shoulder, but that seemed to be the extent of his injuries. He said his name was Brian. He looked to be about eighteen.

“Can you walk?” I asked him, helping him up.

He gave it a try and said, “Yeah.”

The passenger who had been sitting behind Suzanne was now standing. He appeared to be uninjured but for some damage to one of his eyes. I asked him if he was a doctor. It was something I had seen him reading.

“I'm a medical student,” he said.

Everything got military real fast.

“We have to get everyone out of here,” I told them. “And I don't think I can carry those girls. I'm having trouble walking.”

“They shouldn't be moved,” argued the medical student, who told me his name was Paul.

“We have to get them off the plane,” I said. “It could catch fire at any second.”

Paul contended that moving the girls could make their injuries worse. Suzanne was on her feet now—her two-seat unit was collapsed on the floor—and it was she who pointed out that the extent of their injuries would mean little if they burned to death.

Evacuating the aircraft, we faced some difficult odds. We were effectively cut off from the flight deck or, more accurately, whatever was left of it, and that didn't appear to be much. If anyone up there was still alive, he wasn't offering suggestions. We didn't know yet that the pilot was dead, and it was a while before I heard from the copilot. Of the seven people alive in the passenger cabin—one of whom was the little girl—only five could walk. Of those five, I was the most seriously injured, and I operated under the assumption that, even if I managed to walk out of the wreck, I might never walk again. The pain in my back was immobilizing, I had trouble standing upright, and I was losing sensation below the point of the injury. I knew that once I stopped moving, once I was down, I was down for good; I wasn't getting up again. (In fact, it would be another two months before I was able to walk on my own.) The odds against our getting out mounted when the escape windows failed to open.

When I pulled on the emergency handles, to my mystification, they simply came off in my hands. I expected the windows to pop open. When they didn't, I hit them with all I had, and still they refused to give. It was only later, while hospitalized, that I learned from investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board that the hatches, while “moderately distorted,” had not malfunctioned; the handgrips, in fact, are designed to break free, only then allowing the windows to be pushed outward. The exits had failed to open not because they weren't working properly, but because they were held shut from the outside by trees.

The fuselage, all around, was wedged in by brush and timber. An oak tree, standing where the cockpit had been, seemed to be growing inside the airplane. After the windows, the next logical route of escape was the door by which we had boarded the plane, the main cabin door on the left side. Located at the rear of the aircraft, known as an air-stair door, it was hinged to drop open from the top, deploying a stairway as it fell outward. Making no immediate sense of its operation or unable, perhaps, in the available light to read the posted instructions—maybe I feared that the windows had failed because I had somehow mishandled them—I did something completely out of character. I paused. I grabbed a passenger briefing card and followed the printed instructions for opening the door.

I don't know where I summoned the presence of mind to act in so deliberative a manner. Such forbearance is not in my nature. I'm not necessarily impatient with people, but my tolerance for uncooperative inanimate objects is low. Bumping into them by accident is sometimes sufficient to set me off. When faced with malfunctioning machinery, I am quick to lose my temper. I'm not the guy whose help you want when handling precision instruments. More than once in my life has a friend intervened, reaching out to restrain me, as my eyes narrow over some mechanical device and I start calculating the distance to the wall, with the polite admonition that I take a deep breath and “think of this as a Zen moment.”

But I remember that night consciously slowing myself down and taking a methodical approach to the problem. Suzanne, I believe, helped me out. She joined me at the door at some point. Maybe she calmed me down. I released the lock. The latch snapped open. And that door, too, was blocked. Once the mechanism was free, the door fell open just a few inches. And then I reverted to type. I remember putting my foot to it, using the only leg I could raise and groaning with every kick as whatever was behind it started to give. As soon as the opening was wide enough to squeeze people through, I quit.

What lay beyond the door was a mystery. It was absolutely black outside. It was the middle of the night, we were deep in the woods (though we didn't know that at the time), and low-lying fog took care of the rest.