Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  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.

  “I’ll go,” said Suzanne—no surprise there—and she was the first to step int
o whatever was out there.

  And that wasn’t the extent of her fearlessness. Once we got people moving, Suzanne reentered the plane. It was she who eventually moved the injured girls from the forward end of the passenger cabin to the door at the rear of the plane. She and Brian carried the older of them; she moved the younger one by herself. The blood in which her clothing was soaked that night when she stepped out of the woods wasn’t her own.

  After we got everyone through the door—it was a drop of about three feet to the ground—the missing passenger showed up. He simply materialized outside the craft. This would be explained later, again by federal investigators. Apparently the young man, a Harvard student, who’d been sitting in front of Brian, had been launched through the flight deck on impact. He had exited forward, as it were. The investigators were of the opinion that he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. He ended up outside the airplane, on the ground just in front of the cockpit. Later that night at the emergency room, where he was treated and released, he was diagnosed with a broken nose and a couple of broken ribs.

  He told me his name was Jon, and he proved to be very helpful. Quite cheerful under the circumstances, he had that reporting-for-duty attitude, and with Suzanne making plans to disappear, I dispatched him to the other side of the airplane to keep an eye on the copilot. Or rather, to continue to do so. The first thing he had done after getting to his feet was to extricate the copilot from the wreck.

  I’d had a brief exchange with the copilot, and not a very friendly one, shortly after I’d gotten the door open, hailing him when I heard sounds of life coming from the front of the aircraft, the first I’d heard since hearing the expletive barked from that direction. Shouting in the darkness from one end of the plane to the other, I had come away from the exchange with two pieces of information. There was nothing left of the pilot, and the copilot was slipping into clinical shock. He had been bleeding badly, I now discovered. I asked Jon to go back and stay with him, and we had a quick back-and-forth about tourniquets.

  I wasn’t going anywhere. I was now down for good. Once I had stopped moving, it was over. The adrenaline had done its job. It had taken me as far as it was going to. My mobility was now so compromised, it was questionable whether I could even stand up. But Suzanne was another story. She was determined to go for help. I tried to talk her out of it. She said she knew where we were.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

  My reasoning went like this: It was not as if nobody had noticed. People might not have known where we were, but they had to know the plane was not in the air. If we stayed where we were, they’d find us.

  Suzanne, however, was adamant:

  “I know where we are. It’s not far.”

  And saying good-bye, she was gone. My lieutenant had left the field.

  As it turned out, we were not where she thought we were. That she found her way out of the woods at all she owed to pure luck that night, and to what I would forever believe to be (I would know her for no more than an hour) a deep reservoir of good karma. In one way, her instincts were perfect. The people charged with our rescue did not know where we were. The only clue they had to our location, beyond the designated flight path itself, was where we had dropped off military radar, the point at which the plane’s electronic signature had vanished from the screen at Otis Air Force Base at the upper end of the Cape.

  Our location was, in fact, quite specific. As pinpointed by one of the newspapers, published the following morning, we were “in the middle of nowhere.” We were two and a half miles from the airport, half a mile off the nearest trail in an expanse of heavily wooded wilderness, 330 acres of which were owned by the Cape Cod & Islands Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Known as Camp Greenough, in operation since the 1940s, the facility, with the woodland surrounding it, featured several bodies of water, and according to the same newspaper, there were “few areas as remote and inaccessible left on the Cape.” Today there are probably none. It was an hour and a half before rescuers found us. Longer still before, using brush breakers, they were able to get their equipment anywhere close. The plane had crashed around eleven o’clock. It would be close to two in the morning when firefighters carried me out of the woods.

  We waited not far from the airplane, maybe fifty feet at the most, having pushed our way through the undergrowth just about as far as we could, given our collective physical condition and the fact that two of our number had to be carried. Light, however dim, emanated from the crack in the doorway through which we’d escaped the plane, acting as a point of reference until the battery powering it died. The darkness then was total. Invisible to one another, those of us lying on the left side of the airplane were spread out over an area of maybe fifteen feet square, separated by the airplane from Jon and the copilot, who lay in the woods on the other side, just below the cockpit. Jon, using the copilot’s necktie, had tied off the leg that was bleeding.

  The camaraderie commonly imagined when dreaming oneself into such a scenario, the noble feeling of shared sacrifice, never fully took hold. The evacuation had been accomplished in the absence of any genuine sense of it. Missing in action somewhere was that military esprit de corps. Invisible was any trace of bravado. We were draftees, a reluctant army. We had done what we had to do. Nobody was feeling heroic. Now that we were no longer channeling it into saving each other’s lives, everybody had time to luxuriate in an inescapable combination of fear and thoroughgoing anger.

  Attempts at lightening the mood went largely unrewarded. Shouting across the airplane to Jon to help keep up his spirits was the tail trying to wag the dog. He seemed to be doing well under the circumstances, and his good humor, as much as he tried to share it, inspired little response from the others. The middle sister did most of the talking, unable, it seemed, to stop, and I could have been a lot more sympathetic in trying to calm her down. While no doubt in shock herself, it was more out of concern for her sisters that she seemed to be so out of sorts. My insisting that she be quiet, an attempt to keep the level of panic down, was as much a sign of frustration with my own powerlessness.

  The initiative was no longer ours. There had been some early strategizing, but it had ended with Suzanne’s departure. We were counting on others now. Conversation was at best sporadic, as we slipped in and out of the same privacy of thought that had taken hold in the last ten minutes of the flight, those minutes that followed the landing announcement, in which all of us as passengers had trusted in a more prosaic deliverance. If the young woman hadn’t been going on as she did, there wouldn’t have been much more dialogue than you’d find on the page of a film script.

  In the more than an hour in which we waited to be rescued, the copilot said nothing at all—nothing that was audible to anyone but Jon.

  Knowing where Suzanne had come out of the woods may have helped narrow down our location. It’s unclear to this day whether she emerged from the woods before rescuers arrived at the crash site. How long it took her to reach the highway is still something of a guess. When I volunteered a head count and an inventory of casualties to paramedics upon their arrival—acting as if I had things under control, with my back up against a tree—I insisted that all on the scene understand that their work in the woods wouldn’t end that night until they had found the eighth passenger, the young woman who’d walked away.

  What happened to Suzanne after she left me, I learned reading various newspapers. A bona fide hero and willing interview subject, she was understandably a darling of the press, and her adventures were widely reported, but only up to the point at which she finally reached help. Her declining to go to the hospital—cool with the Cosmic Wimpout guys, everything was cool with them—was indicative of what one of them later described as “how together she was.”

  The plane had been down for more than an hour, its whereabouts unknown to Air New England, and the airline had refused to share that fact with the people waiting at the terminal to meet it. For more than an hour, the airline had been stonewalling.
Personnel at Barnstable Airport were offering various excuses for the plane’s delay—that the flight had been diverted, for example—recommending that people go home and wait there to be notified. Leaving the ticket counter unmanned, spending much of their time in an office behind it in a frantic attempt to get answers themselves, they were unconvincing at best.

  “I’m not going home,” Suzanne’s mother had told them, “until my daughter walks through that door.”

  My girlfriend, Mary, was among those waiting, and it was she, barging into the airline office, who confronted Air New England personnel with the understanding that the masquerade was over. In the face of their continued denial, she told them, “One of your passengers just walked in.”

  I spent a week in the hospital. Among the highlights of my stay was a Western Union telegram I received from my friend the Boston mystery writer Robert B. Parker, instructing me to “Recover at once.” A telegram, a great hard-boiled artifact. You’d expect nothing less from Bob. We were both rising stars at the time (he, of course, would ascend to heights that not even he had the bad manners to predict), and each of us would go out of his way whenever he got a good mention to point it out to the other.

  “Glad to hear you’re as tough as I suspected,” he wrote in a subsequent letter. “I am so tough I wouldn’t have crashed.”

  Getting play in the press on Bob’s turf was a great source of amusement for me during my rehabilitation, and I couldn’t wait to confront him with one of the get-well cards I’d received. It had been sent to me at the hospital by a stranger, a woman named Susan in Rhode Island, who wrote that she would like to meet me, and whose signature was followed by this: “age 33—blonde—hazel eyes—125 pounds—fun loving, etc.”

  My only contact in the hospital with the other survivors of the crash was a visit I received from the parents of the three young sisters from Michigan. They came by to thank me for what I’d done for their daughters and to return the shirt I had been wearing that night. I had placed it over one of the girls when she began shivering. I worried that I might not be worthy of their thanks. I would always wonder if carrying their children from the plane had resulted in making their injuries worse. Evacuating the girls had been done at my urging, and it proved, after all, to be unnecessary. The plane never did catch fire.