Crash

A sleek $17,000,000 Lockheed 1011 had all but completed its New York--to--Miami nonstop run on the night of December 29, 1972, when a landing-gear safety light failed to illuminate on the big jet's instrument panel. Captain Robert Loft, in charge of Eastern Air Lines flight 401, aborted the landing. On instructions from the Miami tower, the plane curved west into the darkness over the Everglades; the time was 11:35 and there was no moon. Clearance was granted for the Whisperliner to continue west at 2000 feet while the flight crew checked the light. Both Loft, who was operating the radio, and copilot Albert Stockstill, who was flying the airplane, regarded the incident as an annoyance rather than an emergency. But for them and 174 others aboard flight 401, the holidays were about to end in grotesque horror. A bizarre sequence--starting with failure of a $12 light fixture--was leading inexorably to the first jumbo-jet crash in history.

"Put the son of a bitch on autopilot," Loft said.

"All right," Stockstill answered.

"See if you can get that light out," Loft told the copilot.

The light fixture was removed, examined, then reinserted in its socket. It was a one-inch cube on the right side of the instrument panel. When the light glowed green, it was a signal that the nose gear was down and locked. But it remained unlit.

"You got it sideways," Loft said. "You gotta turn it one quarter to the left."

But now the light cube was jammed. "To hell with this," Loft said. He spoke to Donald Repo, the flight engineer: "Go down and see if it's lined up...that's all we care. Fuck around with that goddamned twenty-cent piece of light equipment they got on this bastard!" Repo climbed down through a trap door into the forward electronics bay beneath the cockpit floor. The space below was called the hellhole.

Stockstill continued to jiggle the light. He and Loft both believed, correctly, that the light was simply burned out and that the nose gear, in fact, was down. But Repo's attempt to check the gear visually was unsuccessful; he stuck his head back up into the cockpit. "I can't see it," he said. "It's pitch-dark and I throw the little light, I get, ah, nothing."

Loft threw a switch on the overhead panel. "Now try it."

Repo went below again. This time he was followed by Angelo Donadeo, an Eastern Air Lines technical specialist who had been riding on deadhead, or off-duty, status in a cockpit jump seat. As Donadeo left the flight deck, he noticed that Stockstill had his right hand on the yoke and was pushing or pulling the light assembly with his left. Loft was reaching across the center pedestal, attempting to help. No one realized that the plane's autopilot had become disengaged and that they were losing altitude.

At the airport, the approach controller looked at his radar screen. Flight 401 was assigned to an altitude of 2000 feet. Crisp green phosphorescent numerals said it was at 900.

The controller radioed the plane: "Eastern 401, how are things coming along out there?"

"OK," answered Loft. "We'd like to turn around and come back in."

The controller authorized the turn--180 degrees left.

On the radio speakers in the cockpit, the tower controller could be heard telling another airplane, Lan-Chile flight 451, to descend to 1500 feet. And for the first time, Loft and Stockstill became concerned about their own altitude.

"We did something to the altitude," Stockstill said.

Loft: "What?"

Stockstill: "We're still at 2000, right?"

Loft: "Hey, what's happening here?"

On the radar screen in the tower, flight 401's altitude now read "CST," the abbreviation for coast stand by.

The controller radioed the Whisper-liner: "And, ah, Eastern 401, are you requesting the, ah, equipment?" He meant the airport fire trucks, ready to stand by, in case the plane's landing gear was, indeed, faulty.

His question went unanswered. From the darkness over the Everglades came only silence.

•

Captain Loft's last announcement had given the Whisperliner's passengers and stewardesses no reason to expect anything other than a normal landing. But several of the cabin occupants noticed that something unusual was happening. In the very rear of the airplane, flight attendant Beverly Raposa felt the jet climbing after the first landing approach was scrubbed. Ronald Infantino, sitting almost precisely halfway between the front and the rear of the aircraft, felt the Whisperliner turn. In first class, Jennifer Larsen noticed the nose lifting slightly.

Adrianne Hamilton, the senior stewardess, sat facing the rear, her back against the cockpit wall. She knew the L-1011 required a long landing approach; this one, however, seemed extraordinarily long. Adrianne did not think of herself as a religious person. Without understanding why, she did something she had never done before in more than four years of professional flying. She said a quick prayer: If anything happens, please let me make it through.

Ann Connell, an off-duty Eastern employee who was familiar with the airport, watched from a cabin window as Miami's lights faded into darkness. She turned to her husband, who was reading a paperback book. "If I didn't know better, I'd think we were being hijacked," she told him. Then she began thinking about the location of the plane's emergency exits and life rafts.

•

When the Whisperliner first touched ground, it seemed to Mrs. Connell that it was in the normal horizontal landing position. Then the plane lifted and hit again. Her husband threw his arm around her shoulders, forcing her to duck forward. The first touchdown had been light, but the second was a solid, grinding impact. The nose of the jet slewed clockwise. A fireball flashed through the cabin from front to rear, touching the ceiling and extending as low as the seat tops. The plane was skidding, rotating on a horizontal axis, and the fuselage was breaking up.

Strapped against the cockpit wall, Adrianne Hamilton lurched left but was held by her seat belt. The lights went out; she was wet, she knew there was fuel on her and was afraid of fire. She thought: You know, this is an airplane crash.

In the rear of the cabin, stewardess Beverly Raposa was shaken like a rag doll. "I could see my arms going in front of me from side to side and I felt my feet go from side to side. My body was held in tightly by the shoulder harness, but the rest of me was going along with this jolting." The coat closet on her left disappeared. She felt fuel slosh over her "like a waterfall."

Angelo Donadeo, in the hellhole beneath the cockpit, had just reached the rear bulkhead and was preparing to look through the wheel-well viewer to see whether the nose gear was down. He felt a concussion that he described as "like two freight trains colliding."

Jerry Eskow awakened to "a lot of noise and a lot of vibrations." He thought he was still asleep, dreaming. "Suddenly, the noise stopped. I was sitting upright in my seat in water up to my waist. I heard screaming. And I realized: If I'm not dreaming, the plane has crashed. And I am alive."

•

The airplane went down in the Everglades. The crash site was west-northwest of Miami, 18 miles from the airport. The terrain was flat marshland on which saw grass grew to heights of ten feet. The grass grew in water, six to twelve inches deep, and beneath the water lay soft black mud.

The plane was traveling 227 miles per hour when it flew into the ground. The left wing tip hit first, then the left engine and landing gear. When the main body of the jet impacted, it continued to move through saw grass and water, disintegrating as it went. From first impact to last movement, the Whisperliner traveled more than one third of a mile.

Pieces of the left wing were strewn for 1600 feet. The left engine separated and was found near the right wing. The cockpit and first-class lounge separated from the remainder of the fuselage. The walls and ceiling tore away as far forward as the cockpit door. The pilot's and co-pilot's seats remained in place, but the flight engineer's seat broke away from its floor tracks. Just to the rear of that, Adrianne Hamilton's jump seat remained intact; across from her, the walls and door of the forward lavatory ripped away. The commode remained in place. The first-class cabin and the first three rows of tourist seats were demolished. The longest piece of fuselage wall left intact contained 11 windows, from what had been a total of 62. Passenger seats were scattered over an area the length of two football fields.

The biggest part of the airplane remaining after the crash was a section of tail ten yards long. An accident investigator would describe the crash as "the most total and complete wreck I've ever seen." Officially, it was classified as a nonsurvivable accident.

•

Gigging frogs from a homemade air boat, Robert Marquis was one of the few humans abroad in the swamp at nearly midnight. He saw a "ball of fire, an orange, orange glow that just lit up and spread out for about 8000 foot across the Glades; looked like it went up maybe 100 foot high."

What Marquis observed was a flash fire. The plane crashed carrying 43,000 pounds of unburned jet fuel. Spewing from broken tanks, the fuel ignited, flared, mixed with cold swamp water--and went out.

Marquis swung the prow of his air boat west, toward the dark spot where the glow had been. He put his foot on the throttle and jounced through saw grass, (continued on page 196)Crash(continued from page 130) underbrush and willow strands. He would be the first rescuer on the scene.

Two minutes after flight 401 disappeared from the airport radar, a telephone rang at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station in Opa Locka, Florida, a Miami suburb. The time was 11:43 P.M. By 11:55, a white Sikorsky HH52A Sea Guard helicopter was airborne and receiving radio directions to the crash scene.

Senior member of the Coast Guard copter crew was Lieutenant Commander Allan Pell, a 39-year-old search-and-rescue veteran. He suspected the mission was a false alarm. Pell knew the Lock-heed 1011 was a new, modern airplane. The weather's clear, he thought. It's a nice night. It couldn't happen.

•

One of the flight attendants took a tentative step into the darkness. She stepped on something a little firmer than swamp mud but not as hard as solid ground. It was a human body. The stewardess did not try to walk farther.

Jerry Eskow did not feel pain. He was naked from the waist up and trembling. Half-submerged in water, he was in his seat, which had separated from the rest of the plane. Eskow did not know that his pelvis was broken, causing internal bleeding that bloated his abdomen; he knew only that his seat belt seemed wedged into his stomach and that he could not unfasten it.

He thought of his wife. "You schmuck," he told himself. "You've never taken more than a week off. You were too busy."

Stewardess Mercy Ruiz, dazed, focused on what seemed to be a pressing problem--somehow, she had torn a nail on the middle finger of her right hand, and it hurt. The broken nail bothered her greatly and she told Beverly Raposa about it. Beverly told Mercy that the plane had crashed, but Mercy did not believe it. "No," she said. "We're going to be home soon."

Mercy thought she felt something hot on the back of her neck. She reached under her hair and her fingers went into a hole in her skull.

"We're going to walk away from here now," Beverly told her. "We're very close to the tail and it might explode."

The two stewardesses stood in the darkness. In the starlight, Mercy saw the remains of the empennage, still containing the number two engine. It seemed horrible to her, like a ghost.

When she tried to walk, the pain hit her. Like Eskow, she had a broken pelvis. She screamed, felt nausea and fought to hold onto consciousness. "I wanted to think. I wanted to pray."

She began to grasp the reality of the crash. "Oh, my God," she cried. "I will never fly again! Never will I go two inches off the ground!"

Beverly and a male passenger moved her. Mercy held Beverly's hand and begged the other flight attendant not to leave her. "Beverly," she cried, "you've got to pray with me!" Together, in a whisper, the two young women said the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father," Mercy began, and her thoughts raced ahead: God, don't let my father and mother find out until they can see me alive.

In addition to comforting Mercy Ruiz, Beverly Raposa rallied the surviving passengers around her. They were soaked with fuel, and she reminded them not to light matches. At her initiative, the little group began to sing. They sang Christmas carols as loudly as they could. They did very well until they tried to sing Frosty the Snowman, and then no one could remember the words.

When Mercy complained that she was cold, Beverly brought an infant and laid him on top of the injured stewardess. "I want you to take care of him," she said. Mercy felt the warmth of the child's body and patted him. She thought she was holding a large child, six or seven years old. In fact, the baby--whose parents had died in the crash--was 11 months old.

•

Jerry Solomon, a young department-store buyer, stepped out of the wreckage assuming that if he was all right, most of the other passengers were also. Solomon did not feel as though he had been in a plane crash. "I didn't have a rip in my clothes. My watch was on my arm and running. I could have just gotten into a taxi and ridden away."

Nearby, a flight attendant was in agony. She said she needed to urinate but was afraid to walk into the darkness. Solomon and the other survivors assured her that it would not be inappropriate for her to relieve herself in front of them. Still, the young woman hesitated. From somewhere in the darkness came the sounds of Beverly Raposa and her little group singing Christmas carols. Solomon and the survivors around him began to sing, too. Solomon was aware of urine running down the stewardess' leg. He continued to sing.

Ronald Infantino came to on his back in saw grass six feet high. "I knew my arm was cut bad. I reached over and my fingers went inside my arm. My left knee was smashed; I hoped it was still there. I was cold, the coldest I've ever been." Like many other victims, Infantino had been stripped nude by the force of the crash. Of all his clothing, only the elastic tops of his socks remained. "I lay out there in the water and said, 'God, why me?' " Other people around him were screaming, and Infantino screamed with them, until his energy was exhausted. He thought of his bride, Lilly, to whom he had been married for only 20 days. She had been sitting beside him when they crashed. She is alive, he told himself. She is alive, too. In fact, Lilly Infantino, thrown unconscious into the shallow swamp water, had drowned.

•

It took Robert Marquis 15 minutes to reach the scene by air boat. "There were dead people everywhere. And half-naked people, some completely naked. I felt so helpless.

"The first one I came to was a man, looked like he was about to drown. Looked like both his legs were broken. Couldn't move. He said, 'Help me, I can't hold my head up much longer.' So I pulled him up and rested his head up out of the water. And then I started making the rounds, trying to help the ones that possibly were drowning."

After some minutes, Marquis noticed a helicopter in the sky. It was obviously searching for the crash, but it was sweeping the wrong area. He got a light from his air boat, turned it on and began swinging it around and around.

•

Commander Pell had flown over the Everglades enough to know that the dim light probably was only an air boat, gigging frogs. Nevertheless, the copter made a pass over the area where the light was moving. Behind Pell, a crewman focused the copter's Night Sun searchlight. Suddenly, the Coast Guard rescue team beheld devastation. The copter spiraled down for a closer look. The only distinguishable piece of airplane was one section of tail. Pell saw bodies. He saw a few hands waving, very slowly. How the hell did anybody live through this? he thought. "There were all kinds of nude people down there. I didn't understand this. It was the worst search-and-rescue case I have ever been on, the worst disaster." The copter made one full sweep of the wreckage area and climbed back to 300 feet to establish radio communication. Pell called the air station. "We've got one hell of a mess out here," he reported.

•

Surrounded by chaos, Anita Kent looked for her husband. They had been sitting together when the plane crashed; now he had disappeared. "The first thing I thought was: Where is Frank? I must find him."

Running through saw grass, she plunged waist-deep into water. The airplane had gouged ruts in the mud; when she encountered these, there was nothing to do but flounder through and climb out the other side. She kept on until she found Franklin Kent, trapped in a nightmarish tangle of wires and cables that pinned both his wrists and half-obscured his face.

Kent had no recollection of the crash; his first memory was one of being caught in shredded metal. He thought: Damn it, I want to get out. But when he struggled, he had the sensation that the wires were severing his wrist. In fact, a tendon was cut through. He lapsed in and out of consciousness. He knew he was badly hurt. He thought: I may not get out of here.

Anita Kent determined that her husband had a large gash in the front of his skull. Wires were cutting into his face. She tried to rip them away with her hands, and when that failed, she tore at them with her teeth. She was able to loosen some of the metal cables and some she gnawed apart.

•

In the blind belly of the electronics bay, Angelo Donadeo took inventory of his plight and that of Donald Repo, the flight engineer. "I was lying on him, and he was lying on me. Our legs were sort of intertwined." It was apparent to Donadeo that the other man was in great pain.

"I've got two busted arms," Repo said. "My legs are busted. We're going to drown."

Donadeo tried to move his weight to ease Repo's suffering. "I tried to pull myself up the ladder. But I couldn't stand the pain in my back. I had to relax and fall back down into the hole. We were both screaming our guts out."

Above the hellhole, Adrianne Hamilton lay against the toilet of the right forward lavatory. Fearing fire, she had unfastened her seat belt and fallen across the slippery deck, which was tilted at a steep angle. Her white telephone and black cabin microphone dangled toward her on their twist cords.

She knew that another flight attendant, Sue Tebbs, was lying helpless a few feet away. There was nothing she could do to help her. "Once I moved, it was like somebody was sticking a hot knife in my back. I had never felt anything like that in my life."

•

By now, ambulances were shrieking their way west from Miami. No road came within eight miles of the crash site, but it would be determined eventually that rescue vehicles could proceed single file along the top of a flood-control levee to within 100 yards of the scene.

The levee also became the first helicopter landing pad. Pell tried various spots closer to the wreckage, abandoning each when his copter rotor stirred up storms of flying jagged metal. Finally, he landed on the levee without difficulty and was met there by Marquis. The frog hunter and the Coast Guard officer conferred; they agreed that Pell would try to land closer to the crash and that Marquis would ferry victims to the copter in his air boat. After two more unsuccessful attempts, Pell managed to land within 20 yards of the wreckage and took on four survivors. They were among 176 crash victims who eventually would be transported from the scene, dead or alive.

•

A second helicopter had left the Coast Guard Air Station at 12:10 A.M., piloted by Lieutenant Commander Bobby Kingery. Among those aboard was an enlisted man, Petty Officer Second Class Don Schneck. A mechanic, Schneck had volunteered for the mission. The officers in charge had seemed reluctant to take him, but he jumped aboard, anyway. "I presumed," he would say later, "that permission had been granted." No one had any way of knowing that Schneck was about to experience an adventure that would be unduplicated by any of the other rescue workers.

The copter dropped Schneck on the levee and started back to the air station for more medical aid; a medical corpsman had been lowered by hoist into the crash site, but Schneck could not see him, and for all practical purposes the mechanic was alone. His only equipment was a yellow landing wand, which someone had handed him when he yelled for a flashlight as he left the air station, and a two-way radio that had been thrust into his hands as he leaped from the copter. Schneck tried the radio and found it useless. His voice, however, attracted the attention of a survivor.

"I calmed him down, and I gave him the radio because I knew it was no good. I gave him the radio and told him to keep calling. It gave him something to do.

"I kept walking. I heard a female voice calling, and it seemed to me like she was up in the air. It was kind of strange. Eventually, I located a woman up on a part of the fuselage. She seemed to be fine, but she was standing there shaking and scared, and I told her to sit down because she was high and dry and in a great place.

"I turned to my left and encountered my first body, which kind of shook me up a little bit. It was a man laying face down in the water." Schneck made a fundamental decision. "I felt that it was my responsibility to pull the living people out. I felt no responsibility toward the people that had died." He left the body in the water and moved on to the nose section of the plane.

Schneck found Sue Tebbs first. The stewardess had suffered a greenstick fracture of her lower left leg. "It wasn't bleeding, and I decided to move her off the aircraft. There was a piece of debris that seemed high and dry, so I put her on that.

"Then I approached Adrianne Hamilton. I asked her if she hurt anywhere, and she said her back hurt. Right away, I decided against moving her."

Schneck was tugging loose debris from around the injured flight attendant when he uncovered the body of Albert Stock-still, the copilot. Stockstill lay face down in the shambles of what had been the flight deck. "He was up against the right side of the bulkhead. I could see approximately from the top of his shoulders up." In the yellow light of his landing wand, Schneck examined the copilot's eyes. "They were dilated. I assumed he was dead." The mechanic felt Stockstill's neck for pulse and found none. Adrianne Hamilton has always been convinced that both Stockstill and Captain Loft survived the impact long enough to carry on a conversation. She heard voices and assumed it was Stockstill who commented that his arm was severed.

Schneck straightened and shone his light around the wrecked cockpit. That was when he spotted Bob Loft, the pilot. "He was laying on his back. I believe he was just coming to, because he had just started to move around. I talked to him, and it seemed like he was in shock. I told him to lay still. I said, 'We'll be getting you out pretty quick,' and I said, 'You made it this far.' "

Loft seemed to listen. Lying in the ruins of his flight deck, the captain looked up at the young man with the yellow landing wand and told him, "I'm going to die."

Schneck assured Loft that he was not dying. He told him he would be rescued soon. But now Schneck no longer could ignore the shouts of Donadeo and Repo in the hellhole. They were yelling, "We don't want to drown!" The mechanic left Loft and climbed down into the dark hole.

"The first man I saw was in great pain. I checked him, loosened his clothing and prayed that the corpsman would come to help me. The other man seemed angered, which is a good sign. I reassured him that he was not going to drown; the water was only a foot or so deep."

Both helicopters had left the crash scene. The medical corpsman was somewhere outside in the darkness, but in the nose of the shattered airplane Schneck was alone with five badly injured people, whose lives seemed awesomely to rest upon his efforts. He went furiously to work, doing what he could: "I pulled the ladder out, because it seemed to be resting on one of the men. Then I crawled out of the hole and kicked the hatch out."

Once more, Loft attracted Schneck's attention. "He started moving around again. He rolled over a chair and made an ungodly noise. I knew that if he continued this, he would cause himself further injuries. I put my hands on both of his arms and held him down."

By this time, Sue Tebb's broken leg was bleeding. Schneck applied a tourniquet. As he worked, he was acutely aware of screams from the hellhole; one of the men down there, he knew, was in excruciating pain. Finally, Schneck spotted the medical corpsman's light moving in the wreckage. The mechanic shouted until the corpsman joined him in the cockpit. Schneck briefed the medic and then remained with Adrianne Hamilton while the corpsman examined Loft and the men in the hellhole. He returned and told Schneck that the pilot was in shock. He said he had given morphine to the man who was screaming below.

Adrianne Hamilton blocked the only exit from the flight deck, but the two Coast Guardsmen hesitated to move her because of her back injury. Schneck continued to make pragmatic decisions. "I put my hand underneath her shoulder blades and started moving it slowly down. I told her to tell me when it really hurt and I would stop. But I went all the way down to the small of her back, and she said, 'It hurts, but it is not extreme.' So I picked her up like a baby and put her next to Sue."

While Schneck and the corpsman were moving the stewardess, they heard a noise behind them. Schneck turned his light toward the sound. Loft was sitting in the flight engineer's seat. Then he fell from the seat onto the floor, landed on his back and struggled until his right foot protruded through a windshield frame.

Now Schneck saw lights coming from the east. Soon there was a roar of rotors, and several helicopters landed directly into the crash site. Rescuers appeared with backboards, and Schneck helped them move Sue Tebbs and Adrianne Hamilton. The mechanic returned to find a man examining the remaining cockpit victims. Schneck challenged the stranger. "I didn't want him fooling around with these people if he wasn't qualified."

The man told Schneck he was a doctor. "And I said, 'Very good, because these people really need help.' I told him there were two people in the hole, and he went down there. I walked up to the cockpit again, to the pilot. The doctor yelled from below. He said, 'Don't worry about that man. He's gone.' "

Schneck was incredulous. Struggling against death in the darkness, the young Coast Guardsman had identified with the airline captain; he wanted urgently for Loft to live. He refused to believe that Loft was not alive until he had examined the pilot himself.

•

It was the job of Ray Eggler, homicide sergeant, Dade County Public Safety Department, to secure the crash scene. This meant protecting the dead, their possessions and all physical objects related to their dying. It was more than a legal formality. The Dade County Medical Examiner, Dr. Joseph H. Davis, was a forensic scientist of the highest order, a physician-detective dedicated to the proposition that dead men do tell tales if one knows how to interpret them. But for this to be possible, strict rules had to be observed. No corpse could be moved until it had been numbered and until a yellow flag with matching number had been planted in the ground to mark where the body was found. Eggler understood the common sense behind Davis' rule. "If you start moving things, then you don't know what happened."

In the midst of the rescue effort, Eggler found himself explaining the rule to Frank Borman, the former astronaut who was then vice-president, and who would become president, of Eastern Air Lines. "Mr. Borman made the comment that rather than us waiting around, he wanted the bodies moved right then," Eggler recalls. Eggler was sympathetic. "I would think his concern would be the publicity and the relatives and everything," he says of Borman. But the police sergeant was in no position to comply. "I explained that we couldn't--that no one could move any bodies, his company or anyone else--until Dr. Davis arrived on the scene. I explained that we would do the scene work and then we would move the bodies; that the details were being set up on how it was to be handled, and he would just have to wait." Borman waited.

•

Even as survivors were being pulled out of the swamp, and as Eggler was insisting that the dead could not yet be moved, dozens of journalists began covering the story of flight 401. Many attempted to reach the scene that night; one of the very few who succeeded was Fred Francis, a 27-year-old general-assignment reporter for Miami's television channel 4, WTVJ.

Francis was asleep at home when a news editor called at 12:15 A.M. to tell him of the crash. He dressed quickly, looked into a mirror and saw a stubble of beard and decided not to take his electric razor and shave in the car. "The ego of the TV reporter took over," he says, "I thought: If I get on camera tonight, that will look good. It'll look like I've been working all night."

Learning that police had blocked the highway into the Everglades, Francis telephoned a private helicopter pilot who had once told him, "If you ever need to get somewhere, call me." The pilot was out drinking, but with the help of the man's wife, Francis eventually located him by telephone in a bar. A slur in his voice gave Francis pause, and the reporter made himself ask, "Are you half in the bag?"

"Well, I've had a few drinks," the pilot said. "But, hell, this is a story, isn't it?" Francis did not argue.

The pilot agreed to pick up Francis and a cameraman, Randy Fairbairn, on Watson Island in Biscayne Bay. The copter arrived with one working headlight, faded paint and no radio. Francis looked at Fairbairn and grinned; no one could order them to turn back.

Over the Everglades, however, the copter began dropping. Francis could smell whiskey on the pilot's breath. He yelled a question: "Why are we going down?"

"Every now, and then I get vertigo," the pilot yelled back.

Fairbairn turned on his camera light. It reflected on the water below and gave the pilot a reference point. The copter stopped losing altitude. Within minutes, the lights of the crash scene came into view, and Francis directed the pilot to land on the levee, 50 yards north of a group of highway-patrol cars. "Now, leave!" Francis yelled as he and the cameraman scrambled out of the copter.

The pilot was puzzled. "How're you going to get your film out?"

"Let me worry about that," Francis told him. "You leave."

"Why?"

"Number one, if you're here, they can make me leave. And number two, they're gonna get the number of your helicopter."

For the first time, the pilot seemed to realize the risk he had taken. Highway patrolmen were jogging toward them along the levee. Francis turned to face them. Between him and the patrolmen, two forms lay across the levee. One was the body of a man, the other of a young, attractive woman. Francis noticed that the woman had not worn a bra.

He was now face to face with the two state troopers. He pointed to the bodies. "Why are they here?" he demanded. He knew the rules; none of the dead should have been moved.

"Well, that was a mistake," one of the patrolmen said. For an instant, Francis had the officers off balance. The bodies had been moved by wildlife officers from the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. Sergeant Eggler of Homicide had been quick to stop the game wardens, but no one knew exactly where the bodies had come from, and there had been no choice but to leave them on the levee. That, however, was not Francis' affair. "Forget that," one of the troopers told the reporter. "You've got to get out of here."

"How?"

The troopers looked north. The helicopter was lifting into the darkness, already too high for anyone to read the registration number.

From the levee, Fairbairn began Filming the removal of survivors. Francis stood behind the cameraman, holding a light and battery pack. "I'm debating whether to try to ask the people anything. I told myself: 'You've got to. You're supposed to. You've gotta ask something.' But for a little while, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was just in awe."

•

Rescue workers unbuckled Jerry Eskow's seat belt and lifted him onto a stretcher. Within minutes, he was on the levee, being loaded into an ambulance. Jerry Solomon and the Connells were brought out by a helicopter that landed at Hialeah Race Track; a station wagon took them from there to Hialeah Hospital. Ron Infantino went all the way by ambulance, as did Franklin and Anita Kent.

Someone took the baby from Mercy Ruiz. Another man bent over the injured stewardess. He was a fireman in a hard hat, and Mercy thought him very handsome.

But when he and other rescuers attempted to load her aboard a helicopter, she refused. "I don't want to go!" she screamed. "Don't put me in that thing!" She became so agitated that the men placed her aboard an air boat instead and took her to the levee, where she was transferred to an ambulance with several other victims. Mercy glanced at a man beside her. "He was muddy and had kerosene on him. I thought his face was burned. He looked awful; I have never seen anybody like that. I didn't know I was worse than he was."

In the warmth of the ambulance, she became less frantic. The ambulance attendant held a cigarette to her lips as she inhaled. Finally, from the window, she saw familiar lights. The ambulance was on the Palmetto Expressway, en route to Palm Springs Hospital, near her apartment in Hialeah.

"I was so happy. It was like coming back from a long trip and seeing something familiar. It was the first indication I was home."

"She stepped on something a little firmer than swamp mud but not as hard as solid ground. It was or human body."