Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  She was hastening to her husband’s bedside when she met Mrs. Klimm on the bus, and throughout her rush to the Cape, she was unaware that there was a fatality associated with the crash he had survived. Nor had she any reason to wonder who had been flying the plane that had almost cost her husband his life.

  “I didn’t know George had been killed,” she said.

  Three days later, at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, the summer parish of the Kennedy family, she joined some five hundred people at Parmenter’s memorial service.

  “It was a very conflicting place to be,” she told me. “I had conflicting emotions about what happened.” But there was nothing equivocal about her grief. “He was my uncle.”

  Parmenter was cremated that day and his ashes released from an airplane over Cape Cod Bay. As his friend Van Arsdale said in his eulogy, “A long, full day in an airplane would seem an appropriate way to end George’s life.”

  Paul, for his part, didn’t know Parmenter personally. “I knew of him, but I never met him,” he said.

  Wendy remained on the Cape for a week. Three or four days into her stay, Paul was released from the hospital. The injuries he had sustained were clearly more serious than had been apparent to me in the wake of the crash. His collision with the seat back in front of him, in addition to breaking his nose, had broken the bottom of both orbital sockets.

  “It was like a two-by-four across the face,” he told me.

  I had taken the same two-by-four just above the eye.

  A year after the crash, he would have follow-up surgery to correct the damage to his nose, but the blow-out fracture of the orbits, as the injury to the floor of the eye sockets is known, would permanently affect his sight.

  “My left eye is sunken a millimeter or two, and I have some double vision.”

  The double vision is of minor concern, he said, limited to a very specific positioning of his eyes when lowered. Whether the condition had any practical consequence is a question he shrugs off, but the symptom would seem to have limited his choices when it came to pursuing a specialty. A surgical residency was probably not in the cards. But all that would come much later. Amid the chaos of the crash itself, dwelling on his injuries was a luxury Paul could not afford.

  In the silence that enveloped the aircraft at the moment it came to a stop, Paul’s faith in the natural order of things went largely unrewarded.

  “I was waiting for the voice of authority,” he said.

  Mine was clearly insufficient to his needs.

  “I was wearing clogs,” he remembered. “I spent the first minute looking for my shoes.”

  From the time he was able to find them to the time I was able to crack the door, several minutes passed. And as soon as the door was open, Paul escaped the wreck. He was the second one through. While he was moving away from the plane, Suzanne, climbing out of the underbrush, was coming back aboard. Paul, all the activity behind him now, had the darkness to himself. He stood in the woods alone.

  “Once the plane comes to rest, move toward the exit as quickly as possible. Fire and poisonous fumes can quickly fill the cabin, trapping you inside. . . . Get away from the crash site as soon as possible. It’s going to become a very lethal environment. . . .”

  That is the incantation. That, in abbreviated form, extracted here from the remarks of an FAA air-safety investigator, is what the professionals tell you to do. It is the industry-wide protocol, and Paul had followed the ritual precisely, without the help of anyone in authority. He had managed to save himself, honoring without error his obligation to do so. He had every reason to be satisfied with what he had accomplished.

  Every reason but one.

  Paul was about to solve a mystery, a puzzle that had confounded me since I’d first sat down with Suzanne. In determining who had done what that night, I was confronted with a simple arithmetic problem. Half of it he had just addressed. I had wondered why Suzanne had found herself alone at the front of the cabin once the eldest sister had been removed from the plane. Suzanne and the passenger named Brian had carried the young woman to the door. Carrying that sister off the plane would have required the work of two, and that would have left one other person, one person other than me, onboard the plane with Suzanne. Yet, Suzanne, according to what she told me, had been left to move the youngest girl on her own.

  “I couldn’t pick her up,” she told me, that afternoon we met in Dennis, her eyes narrowing when she said it, as if signaling some kind of regret. She described kneeling on the deck in the blood, the fuel, and the broken glass, trying to get some kind of leverage. I asked her who finally helped her get the little girl to the back of the plane. She seemed saddened by the memory. Lowering her voice, she finally said, “Bob, I think I just dragged her.” She said it as though sharing a confidence, as if alarmed by what she had done, as if there were something for which to apologize in risking her life for the child. Unable to lift the girl, she finally took her by the collar. “And I just dragged her to the door.”

  Her being left to do it alone was now explained by the fact that Paul had already escaped the cabin. But how, then, to explain, I wondered, getting the little girl off the plane? Suzanne had managed to do it, but not without some help. And I hadn’t provided it. By then I was standing below the door, working it open from the outside. With Paul behind me in the woods, the first evacuee, the eldest sister, had to have been carried off by the other people onboard, some combination of Suzanne, the middle sister, and Brian. (If Suzanne had been one of them, she had reentered the plane yet again.) Jon, thrown clear of the plane, had yet to materialize. Whatever the combination, once the eldest sister was off the plane, Suzanne had wound up alone, kneeling at the front of the cabin with a twelve-year-old she couldn’t lift; she’d had to drag the child to the door at the rear. So who carried the little girl out?

  Well, by then the arithmetic had changed.

  “It was clear,” Paul continued, “that not everybody was able to get out. I thought, what if I stand here, and it doesn’t blow up for a couple of minutes? I could have gotten them out in those couple of minutes.”

  He could not have stood there for more than a moment before coming to that realization, but sitting there in my living room, casting his thoughts back to that night, he seemed to be reliving an eternity as he told me what ultimately happened.

  “I went back in,” he said.

  When I’d boarded the plane at LaGuardia, I’d taken the seat opposite Paul’s. It was from there I’d observed him reading. I took the seat forward of that position, across the aisle from Suzanne’s, after returning from the rear of the cabin, where I’d walked to light a cigarette once the plane was airborne. I’d asked Paul if he minded my smoking, and he’d been quick to answer “Yes.” Not an unreasonable response, but maybe it was the way he said it. I remember thinking, The guy’s got balls. It wasn’t until twenty-eight years later, sitting there in my living room, that I realized how big they were.

  Paul climbed back aboard, and by the time he did, Suzanne had dragged the youngest girl the length of the fuselage. Paul grabbed the girl by the armpits, lifted her off the deck, and with Suzanne holding her by the feet, they maneuvered her off the plane.

  “We had to fold her through the half-open door,” he recalled.

  He stayed with her through the night, keeping an eye on her until rescuers arrived.

  “I took her pulse, felt her skin temperature.”

  The most he was able to determine, he said, was that the twelve-year-old had a closed-head injury of some kind. The concussion had rendered her unconscious, and she remained that way through the hours that followed.

  I don’t know if it was because or in spite of the fact that Paul was a medical doctor, but I was unsurprised to hear him say that the events of that night had little effect on the way he looked at life. He saw himself, he said, in much the way a friend later described him: as a member of “the lucky bastards club.” Had the incident changed his outlook at all, he probably wouldn’
t remember it, anyway. Paul graduated from medical school in the spring of 1980. In April 1981, his father succumbed to the colon cancer with which he had been hospitalized the week of the crash. It was a disease to which there was a genetic predisposition in the family. Paul was doing a pediatric residency at Duke University, and he and Wendy were expecting their first child when, shortly before his father died, Paul was diagnosed with cancer himself. Talk to him about survival and the conversation starts there.

  We ended our visit that day on a light, though not entirely irrelevant, note, expressing our shared appreciation for the music of the late Warren Zevon. In describing life after the prospect of death, Paul had been moved to quote Zevon, who gave an answer as memorable as the songs he wrote to describe life in the anticipation of dying. When Zevon was asked by television’s David Letterman if he knew anything more about life and death in light of the inoperable lung cancer that he knew would soon kill him, Zevon replied that if he had learned anything, it was “how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

  My house is not strictly configured as such, but in orientation it is essentially backward. While the front door faces the street, pretty much everything else faces the opposite way, overlooking the salt marsh in back. The main living area, where Paul, Wendy, and I were sitting, is a single room that runs the length of the house, and the side giving onto the water is a lot more window than wall. It is natural for guests, either coming or going, to pause to take in the view and just as natural for me to point out to them various landmarks. But never in the years since I’d built the house had I thought to specify a geographical feature as far in the distance as the one I specified that day.

  “Out that way, beyond the point, on the other side of the bay,” I said, directing Paul’s attention to the southwest, “that’s Yarmouth Port right there.”

  We’ll always have Paris.

  Before he and Wendy left that day, I asked Paul a question to which I already knew the answer. I asked it because I was curious whether the answer was meaningful to him. The NTSB report, which Paul had apparently read, mentioned no one by name, with the exception of the pilot and first officer, so it was possible that Paul was unmindful of the twisted symmetry of it all. When I followed up in a subsequent phone conversation, telling Paul what I knew, the surprise he expressed seemed to be genuine. I had asked him for the name of the doctor to whose practice he had been attached when he was doing his externship on the Cape that summer, the internist whose patients he saw during office hours and with whom he made rounds at the hospital. Of course, I knew the answer was Grover Farrish.

  I don’t think of myself as a tough guy, but like any reasonably active guy, I had been knocked around often enough in my life that the beating I took when the plane hit added only fractionally to my experience of the world. What was entirely new was the g-load.

  Go from over 140 miles an hour to 0, and if you do it over a short enough distance, you’re necessarily going to pull g’s. An irresistible consequence of rapid deceleration, the g-load is expressed as a multiple of the force exerted by gravity on a body at rest, and how that feels—and what it means—can be explained in far more entertaining fashion in the context of rapid acceleration, with which g-forces are more commonly associated.

  In a five-g maneuver in a fighter jet your weight increases correspondingly. Your ten-pound head weighs fifty pounds. If you allow it to drop, you can’t pick it up. When it’s locked in position, you can’t turn it. The strain on the neck muscles is visible. It’s the same strain you see wrinkling the face of an astronaut when observing him training in a centrifuge or watching him leave the earth.

  G-loading is what adds the thrill of rocketry to roller coasters. It’s what pushes you back in your seat and makes it difficult to breathe. Pulling g’s causes the blood to pool in the lower part of your body, and its impact grows more dramatic the longer the g-force is applied. As the blood rushes away from your brain, the physiological punishment escalates: from grayout to blackout to what aviation physiologists call g-LOC, for g-induced loss of consciousness.

  (Redout is what happens when you push negative g’s and the blood rushes the other way, visible as it engorges the vessels of your eyes. Both positive and negative g’s can kill you, but human tolerance for negative g’s is much lower. Pushing down hard from level flight, executing a steep dive, will subject one to negative g’s—experienced as an approximation of weightlessness—so rather than push forward on the control stick, a pilot will roll the aircraft and, with his cockpit facing the ground, draw back on the stick and pull positive g’s instead.)

  The progressive failure of my peripheral vision as the plane careered through the trees was symptomatic of grayout, my field of view rapidly narrowing until my central vision quit and everything went black. When pulling g’s, because arterial pressure in the retina is less than that in the brain, you black out without losing consciousness. And if you think that’s not exciting, try to imagine it against the appropriate soundtrack.

  Imagine eight thousand pounds of aircraft aluminum being shoved through an industrial grinder, a whining, roaring, absolutely deafening noise that occupies every register, audible to people a mile away. Imagine the sound from inside the grinder, threatening never to stop until you are dead. It sounded like that.

  I can hear it now.

  Loss of consciousness would have been something of a blessing.

  It was not until after acquainting myself with the relevant physiology that the experience really made sense to me. The seconds between impact and coming to rest were like entering another dimension, a frame of reference the contours of which I was never able to delineate. It was an experience that I was capable of describing only as surreal.

  Knowing what I know now explains the hallucinatory nature of the ordeal, new at the time and so unique to the circumstances that it resisted explanation. While I’m aware that the blow I took to the head might have required some shaking off, I am no longer confounded by the absolute certainty that I remained conscious throughout the crash. I don’t know what other mechanics came into play in the moment of collision. I’ll never know what there was in the explosive force of the impact that caused my wrist to break through the steel of my watch-band or that might explain what happened to Suzanne, who told me that before standing up, she found it necessary to refasten her bra. These are mysteries I’ll have to live with.

  The g’s we pulled when the plane hit, as punishing as they were, fell within survivable limits. And the angle of the plane’s contact with the forest floor had a lot to do with keeping them there. Descending through the trees at angles that varied from four to twenty degrees, according to the crash report, the “aircraft impacted on 10.2° downsloping terrain.” We struck the first tree about thirty feet up, destroyed almost forty trees before hitting the ground, and continued taking out timber over a distance of another one hundred feet, moving on a relatively flat trajectory, creating a wreckage path about sixty feet wide. The trees we killed acted as shock absorbers, dissipating the energy of the collision, which reduced the magnitude of the decelerative forces and extended their duration.

  Which wouldn’t have been much to celebrate if the plane had then caught fire.

  “I thought, ‘Oh my God, if it ever goes ...’ ” one of the paramedics working the scene that night later told the Cape Cod Times.

  How likely was it that the plane would ignite? The numbers governing the probability of fire in an air crash are a statistical mirage. There are contributing and mitigating factors, of course, some of which are intuitively obvious, but none of them, alone or collectively, can be relied upon to elevate scientific certainty beyond the limits of a good guess. Looking at it from various angles, and reading between the lines, I come away convinced that as often as not it’s pretty much just the luck of the draw.

  Weighing against ignition of the aircraft were the chemical properties of jet fuel, its flash point and flammability. A fire lieutenant on the scene that night pointed i
t out to reporters, and every pilot I’ve talked to since has pointed it out to me. Until now, I’ve pretended to know what they’re talking about. Recently, rather than nod my head, I decided to look it up. The chemistry can be stated in a paragraph:

  The flash point of a combustible liquid is the lowest temperature at which its fumes can be ignited in air by a flame. Commercial jet fuel is almost pure kerosene. Its flash point is about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, four times higher than that of avgas, or aviation gasoline, the 100-octane flight fuel used in piston-driven engines. Its higher flash point makes it safer than gasoline to transport and handle and less likely to ignite in a crash. Jet fuel, or turbine fuel, is also less flammable than gasoline. For hydrocarbon fumes to ignite, the ratio of vapor to air must fall within flammable range, a range that is specific to every volatile substance. And between the upper and lower flammability limits of jet fuel the range is relatively narrow.

  That’s it, in about 130 words. Science was on our side. But science alone is insufficient in predicting how these things will play out. The chemistry is merely comparative. High flash point and low flammability didn’t help the passengers of Flight 191 in Chicago or the dead of Lower Manhattan two decades later.

  (Whatever the other differences between jet fuel and gasoline, I can assure you of this: They don’t smell different. Not to me. They didn’t back then. For months after the crash, I recoiled at the smell of fuel, suppressing a disorienting physical reaction every time I pulled into a filling station.)

  In reconstructing the crash in the woods that night, it’s hard to know how to weigh the fact that the plane came apart upon impact. The fuel tanks of the De Havilland were destroyed along with the wings as the wings were sheared from the airframe. What was left of the tanks ended up fairly well back in the wreckage path. Were we fortunate that the tanks were cut away from the aircraft or fortunate to have survived in the face of the fact that they were compromised? There was a suffusion of fuel in the cabin. Everyone aboard was drenched in it. And so was the immediate terrain.