Two Flights, Two Rivers

A few weeks ago, January 13, was the 30^th anniversary of one of Washington DC’s saddest stories, the ill-fated Air Florida Flight 90.

I am the daughter of a commercial airline pilot (former Navy) and my family and I have always been hyper-aware of airplane crashes.  Having grown up in the DC area, I vividly remember this accident when it happened—the magnitude of the disaster stunned me.  A heavy snowstorm, the really wet, icy, messy kind in which the DC area seems to specialize.  14^th Street Bridge taken out.  78 people killed, mostly immediately.  In the water. They were never even really airborne, the plane just kind of lumbered into the air and flopped down into the river like a dodo bird, breaking through the ice and disappearing almost completely.

And worse and worse.  

• The federal government had released its employees early that day because of the storm, so the roads were packed with commuters—4 of the killed were on the bridge.

• Metro, the DC area’s subway system, had its first fatal accident that day—so the Orange and Blue Lines were both suspended.

The few passengers who survived the crash found themselves in the Potomac River—a dangerous river even in optimum conditions, it was now choked with ice floes.  Stunned, broken and literally freezing, they could do nothing to help themselves—they could only wait to be rescued.  And wait they did—the only way to reach the survivors was now either by air or by water.

There is something especially haunting about dying underwater—the claustrophobia, the dark, the horrible inversion of Freudian birth imagery.  And the river was cold, so cold.  The survivors had only minutes to spare before hyperthermia would kill them, and many were blind from the aviation fuel that now covered the surface of the river.  The helicopters arrived and hovered over and on the waters, throwing down rescue lines to tow the people to shore.  At one point the skids of the 'copter went below the surface.

Bystanders on the bridge and the riverbanks were shouting encouragement to the flailing survivors.  Hold on, just hold on.  Help is coming.  Stay strong.  The river was so narrow, the survivors so close, everyone could see them easily--you could feel their struggles, you could read the expressions on their faces. 

Eventually Priscilla Tirado, who’d broken both her arms and had lost her husband and baby in the crash, simply could not hold on any more and began to go under.  In a breathtaking feat of heroism, Lenny Skutnik, one of the bystanders on the bridge, stripped to his shirtsleeves and bare feet and dove in to help her.

To this day, if you asked a DC-er who was around in 1982 who Lenny Skutnik is, they will remember.  A month after Flight 90, the Washington Post published its annual Valentine's Day personals, and one anonymous admirer captured the gratitude of a region, saying simply WE LOVE YOU LENNY SKUTNIK.  But Skutnik was only the most famous--the day had several other heroes.  Roger Olian, who jumped in merely to give comfort to the survivors, even though he believed the situation was hopeless.  Arland Williams who survived the initial impact and passed the rope to several other passengers until he slipped under the waters. That section of the 14th Street Bridge is now named after him.

Flight 90 happened 30 years ago, when the airline industry was very different from what it is today.  In the early '80s airline travel, in the midst of de-regulation, was nonetheless comparatively glamorous and exotic.  My father and his cohorts were widely admired.  And gradually the glamor eroded--as customers compared bargains, precipitating a race to the bottom, the legacy carriers, with infinitesimally small profit margins, eliminated more and more perks.   Airlines are considered by some today little better than buses in the sky, the highly-trained pilots and crew dismissed as mere functionaries.

And then, a few years ago, another airline disaster nearly happened, and the parallels were striking.  A southbound flight, crippled just after takeoff.  A river in a major metropolitan area.  Mid-January.  But Captain Sullenberger and his crew rewrote the narrative and gave us the Miracle on the Hudson.  Instead of 78 killed, every single passenger and crew member was saved, with scant injury.*

To put this in perspective, this was the most successful ditching of a commercial liner EVER--all previous commercial ditchings incurred fatalities.  The margin of error is so much less forgiving with commercial jets--they are more unwieldy and more difficult to maneuver, the wings are longer, the number of possible casualties much higher.  But Sully never blinked--cool and calm he told his passengers to "brace for impact"** and guided his wounded craft onto the freezing water.

He and his crew made me proud, so proud, to have a father who's an airline pilot.

*Admittedly faced with a very different kind of challenge.  Pilots [i.e., military ones] are trained for ditchings, whereas Captain Wheaton and First Officer Pettit, the Air Florida pilots, never had a chance, as the plane never even really lifted off.


**Sully seems to have a gift for pithiness--I love his reply to the air traffic controller's suggestion that he turn around and land at LaGuardia.  One word: "Unable."