That meant McComb-Pike County Airport in McComb, Mississippi, eighty miles from Jackson in the southwest quadrant of the state. Given a path there, a few minutes later Gray told the controller, “We are not declaring an emergency, but we do need to get close to McComb as straight and good as [we] can get, sir.” Then, at 6:45, “Center, five victor Mike we’re out of fuel.”
Houston replied, “Roger, understand you’re out of fuel?”
“I am sorry,” Gray clarified, “it’s just an indication of it,” not explaining what, in lieu of a working gauge, that indication was. Seconds later, the controller requested what the plane’s altitude was.
“We’re at four point five,” said Gray, meaning 4,500 feet. That was the last time anyone on the ground heard from the pilots. Several attempts were made to contact them, and located a weak transmission from an emergency locator transmitter, but there was no response.
In the plane, William Gray finally came into the cabin and made an announcement to the passengers. “We’re out of gas—put your heads between your legs and buckle up tight.”
As Rossington later said, “We were just freaked out.” Ashen, the passengers began sitting down and buckling up. But Ronnie was out of it, spread out in the aisle, either unable to sleep in his seat or so hung over that he had collapsed, or because, as Odom says, he had given him two sleeping pills to help him sleep. Odom would tell later of trying to lift him bodily and dump him in his seat, but that might not have happened. Chris Charlesworth recalled that people on the flight told him Ronnie was “flat out drunk” and lying immobile “in the aisle when the plane went down. No one could move him to a seat, let alone strap him in.”
It seemed everyone on the plane had a different story about what Ronnie was or was not doing as the plane was going down. Pyle even said that, rather than being out cold on the floor, Van Zant had at the first sign of danger walked toward the back of the plane. “[H]e stood right beside me and we shook hands, the old hippie handshake, and I looked into his eyes and he smiled a beautiful smile … and he rolled his eyes like, ‘Oh, shit, here we go.’ He had a crimson velour pillow, and he was walking back to the front of the plane, and I thought, ‘Bad idea … the front of the plane’s not a good place to be.’”
Regardless of the confusion about Van Zant’s actions, there evidently was little panic as the drama unfolded. In an eerie silence, people began softly weeping and saying prayers. Some sat as if catatonic. Most hoped that the peaceful fall through the sky meant the landing would be as smooth. As nightfall descended, they could see lights in the distance, and then the dark outline of swampland and forests, and then trees. For all their failures, McCreary and Gray were bringing the plane in level and true at a slight angle. Had there been a clearing, it might have landed on its belly and remained upright, perhaps limiting the damage. But, losing power and coming to a near crawl, it couldn’t clear those damn trees.
Odom, in another claim, said that moments before, he had raced to the cockpit again and told McCreary and Gray, “I hope you two sons of bitches live through this, so I can kill both of you.” The most common hope among the passengers, though, was simply to live through the coming disaster. The silence was interrupted by treetop branches tickling the bottom of the plane. Then came thumping. Now the trees were visible in the murky light outside the windows. Odom insists that as this happened, he was still trying to get Ronnie into his seat. As he struggled to lift him, Ronnie, he said, could only mutter, “Man, just let me sleep.” Odom, who never would buckle himself in, says he slapped Van Zant hard across the face and yelled, “Ronnie, man, the fuckin’ plane is crashin’!”
Indeed, the plane could not get through the trees and hit an eighty-foot pine, shearing off a wing and sharply changing the angle of the landing. Then it hit a second one, tearing off the entire front section, which became mangled in a grotesque L shape as it slid through a thicket of brush and swamp, strewing debris and wreckage 150 feet. As soon as the nose hit the turf, McCreary and Gray died on impact from massive injuries. The passengers, no matter where they were sitting, were tossed about like rag dolls. Cabin walls were ripped apart. Seatbelts broke away, and cushions, luggage, books, trays, food, and pieces of fuselage flew wildly, becoming deadly projectiles. Some people were ejected from the twisted cabin, while others, mainly in the rear section that came to rest fairly intact, were still upright in their seats, in shock. Everywhere, bones were broken, flesh punctured.
Only feet behind the cockpit, Steve and Cassie Gaines and Dean Kilpatrick had also been killed on impact, suffering massive injuries from head to toe. Somehow, Gary, Kevin, and Ronnie seemed to have lucked out. As the front of the plane had crumpled like an accordion they’d been thrown bodily atop Steve Gaines and Kilpatrick. Both of Gary’s arms and his pelvis were broken—“I broke just about every bone in my body,” he would later say—and Kevin’s legs, right arm, and right ankle were broken in addition to a collapsed lung. For a few precious seconds, amid all this carnage, Ronnie seemed to have escaped serious injury. He had some lower-body fractures and contusions, but nothing life threatening, until the plane skidded into another tree and a limb that penetrated the plane struck him squarely in the forehead, dealing one single blow. A lethal blow.
At twenty-nine, Ronald Wayne Van Zant couldn’t get by that one creepin’ black cat and had ridden that last horse. His complicated life, carved in nearly equal measures of self-confidence and self-doubt, was over in a split second of chaos, broken and lifeless in the Mississippi swampland. It was terrain he knew and had even sung about in “Mississippi Kid,” but in the end it was terrain he couldn’t fight his way free of.
Bunched in the mangled front section was Allen Collins, his spine badly injured and his right arm so badly cut that he would almost die of blood loss and his arm would nearly need to be amputated. Leon Wilkeson’s chest was injured, and in addition to his severe internal injuries, his left arm and leg were broken; later, at the hospital, his heart would stop beating twice on the operating table before surgeons were able to revive a steady heartbeat. Billy Powell’s right knee was broken, and his face was left in a bloody pulp. Gene Odom, who was thrown fifty feet from the plane, his neck broken, and was seriously burned even though the plane never caught on fire, crawled back toward the plane. When he got to Billy, he said, “he pushed me away. His nose was almost torn from his face, and he was afraid he might lose it in the mud and the dark.”
Artimus Pyle, meanwhile, the only one of the band members fortunate enough to have been sitting in the back, still had broken ribs and bruises all over his body. In shock and pain, not knowing who was dead or alive or where he was, with his clothes nearly torn off, he made his way through the bodies of moaning, terrified people and began to trudge through the pitch blackness outside, wading through swampland, unsure if there were alligators in there.
In one of his many narratives of survival told in the years since, he said, “We hit the ground. I forced myself out from under the wreckage. My chest was crushed…. My breastplate was cracked on impact. All of the cartilage was ripped from the impact…. But I started walking to get help…. I remember looking up from the swamp, and help was so close but so far away. And then I heard this snake slither up to me in the darkness and I remember saying, out loud, ‘Snake, I will bite your fucking head off.’ Nothing was going to stop me from getting help. I’m a Marine. We don’t leave anyone behind.”
In all his renderings of this heroic effort, Pyle has always seemed to forget that he didn’t make that expedition himself. When he set out, he was with Ken Peden and another roadie, Mark Frank, both of whom were also covered in blood and braving their own injuries. Peden, a Mississippi native, was familiar with the kind of woods they had to traverse, and led them through to a cow pasture and then a dirt road. When they tried to flag down a passing pickup truck, the driver sped past them—with legitimate cause. News reports that day said three convicts had escaped from jail and were suspected of being somewhere in the swamps. The few peop
le who lived in the area were on edge.
At 6:55 PM, another plane had reported to a controller at McComb Airport that an aircraft had crashed in heavily wooded terrain near Gillsburg, Mississippi, a good twenty miles beyond McComb, almost right on the southern border with Louisiana, and sixty miles short of Baton Rouge—in the proverbial middle of nowhere, the closest incorporated town being Liverpool, Louisiana, ten miles to the south. It was sixty-two degrees, the wind calm, so weather had nothing to do with the plane having overshot its coordinates so much. The plane had no flight data recorder (it was not required to), so the mystery of what had happened would never be definitively known. However, the only plausible explanation is that the pilots had miscalculated and mishandled the crisis in every possible way, costing them their own and others’ lives and altering the course of music and culture in those frightful minutes over Mississippi.
Now bodies were scattered through the woods and in need of help before still others died as well. Pyle, Peden, and Frank meanwhile found a clearing, a plowed field behind a farmhouse (actually, a mobile home). After climbing over a barbed wire fence into a barnyard, they were met by a man with a shotgun, the owner of the home, Johnny Mote, a twenty-two-year-old farmer. Seeing the bedraggled, mud-and-blood-covered trio—and with the news of the escaped convicts in mind—he freaked. As Pyle recalled, “I’ve got long hair and I look like Charles Manson and I’m covered with blood. He thought I was an escaped convict. He raised his shotgun and pointed it over my head and pulled off a round and the residual buckshot caught me in my left shoulder and spun me around and I fell to the ground.” Pyle could only call out “Plane crash!” as he went down.
“Is that what that was?” asked Mote, who had heard the rumble of the plane.
He apologized for shooting Pyle and helped him to his feet. While the three men told of the plane going down, Peden would later say, Mote’s wife was “hugging me around the neck and telling me, ‘We’ve got to get them out!’” Pyle would say he got into Mote’s pickup and the two of them careened down dirt roads getting help. However, Peden said Pyle remained outside Mote’s house nursing his shoulder and waiting for help. In any case, within a few minutes—remarkably, given the conditions—medics were already at the crash scene. So were dozens of gawkers trying to get a glimpse of the plane. Floodlights bathed the area like a movie set. The Red Cross, having just had a blood drive, was able to give transfusions at the site. Most of those who remained conscious were so disoriented and in shock that they couldn’t identify themselves or anyone else; many would never remember exactly what happened when the plane hit. Some would be in comas for days or weeks.
The dead were taken to a temporary morgue in a high school gym. Nineteen of the surviving victims were taken to Southwest Regional Medical Center in McComb, and one was transported to Beachman Memorial Hospital in Magnolia. Gary recalled lying on the cold, wet ground for an hour waiting to be lifted into an ambulance; the carnage around him, he said, looked “like Vietnam or something.” The band members were taken to McComb, where all thirty-one people on staff were called in. The first floor was turned into an emergency room. The injured all were conscious and wailing hysterically in pain. Allen’s arm, nearly severed, hung limply as he was carried in on a stretcher. He and many others would require delicate neurosurgery, not a common procedure at the time. Most of the victims would not leave the hospital for weeks. Miraculously, though, all would come out alive.
Among those waiting at the airport in Baton Rouge was George Osaki, the band’s album designer. He had been at his hotel when a bellboy told him about the crash. Osaki then flew to McComb and was brought to Southwest Regional. He was given a list of rooms that the surviving members of the band were in. Not seeing all the bandmates listed, he asked, “Where’s Ronnie and Steve?”
“Come with us to the morgue,” he was told.
This was before there had been a confirmation of anyone’s death, and Osaki remembers the sick feeling he had after walking through the morgue door. “I’d never seen a dead person before. They pulled the sheets back…. I saw Cassie, she was mangled, Steve was mangled, Ronnie, it was like he was sleeping. I wanted to go shake him up and say, ‘Ronnie, wake up!’ My legs just went and a cop held me up…. They didn’t know Lynyrd Skynyrd, I was the only guy there who knew who the people were…. I told them who everybody was and they took me out of there.”
An early report on a local Mississippi TV station said there had been no survivors. Some radio and TV stations across the country ran with the erroneous report. That night, the actual toll was revealed in McComb’s Enterprise-Journal, the front-page blaring the news that GILLSBURG PLANE CRASH KILLS SIX, HURTS 20 INCLUDING ROCK SINGERS. The paper also ran a photo of the twisted wreckage, an image that would be seen all across the world in the next twenty-four hours. Back in Jacksonville, the Skynyrd wives didn’t hear about the plane going down for hours. Charlesworth, who was to fly to Baton Rouge the next day, was in Peter Rudge’s office with the staffers celebrating Street Survivors going gold. When he got home, he heard the stunning news on TV.
“I tried to call Rudge at home,” he said. “Peter had just heard too. He was on his way to the office. I grabbed a cab and went straight there. I was the first to arrive, and the phones were all ringing at once. Then Rudge arrived. He’d been to pick up a carton of cigarettes because he knew it would be a long night. He looked distraught and opened a bottle of red wine but he somehow maintained his composure until, eventually, around 1 AM, we heard that Ronnie was dead. Then he went alone into the office kitchen and wept. The girls who worked at Sir manned the phones all night, crying as they did. The various wives and girlfriends of the guys in the band and the road crew were on the lines wanting to know the latest. Eventually they all gathered at Ronnie and Judy’s house and what dreadful scenes of hysteria and grief that house must have witnessed that night I can barely imagine. The job of telling Judy that Ronnie was dead fell to Rudge.”
For Rudge, it was a day of excruciating drama and trauma. Not only had he lost the guts of his top American act, but it had been his decision to use the Convair. Some within the Skynyrd extended family would hold him to account for that; and some survivors would sue him and the band for having put them in a flying death trap. But for now, Rudge could only try to make things easier for the families. He sent private planes that industry people put at his disposal to pick up the wives and take them to McComb. When Rudge himself got there he went straight to the hospital. Clay Johnson, one of the roadies, says he asked him “why he put a million-dollar band in a dollar-ninety-eight airplane.” Says Johnson: “He didn’t have much to say … but, you know, he was in shock.”
Judy arrived early the next morning to claim Ronnie’s body at the morgue, and then take his remains home. Meanwhile at the crash site, some strange things were happening. The gawkers had increased in number, and security was lax. It would be learned that the victims’ belongings, when cleared from the woods, had been looted, and items such as cameras, wallets, and jewelry were stolen. A briefcase with the band’s proceeds from the tour, which was carried by Ron Eckerman, was found, forced open, with $1,100 in cash missing. “Souvenir” hunters had to be chased away by the cops. Eventually, around $6,900 in cash and almost $88,000 in checks were somehow recovered.
Months after the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completed its investigation and determined that the probable cause of the crash was fuel exhaustion and “total loss of power from both engines due to crew inattention to fuel supply.” The board blamed “inadequate flight planning and engine malfunction of undetermined nature” in the right engine, which had resulted in “higher than normal fuel consumption.” Although Odom raised the possibility that Gray had been using cocaine before the flight, pharmacological tests indicated no traces of drugs or alcohol in either pilot’s blood. McCreary’s flight bag did contain a prescription drug, Librax, an anxiety reliever, but it was said not to be a factor. The bottom line was that McCreary and Gray w
ere “either negligent or ignorant” of the available fuel supply.
Ronnie Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, and Dean Kilpatrick had lost their lives due to the worst possible and least acceptable reason: incompetence. It was, as Ronnie had sung about the way he thought he might actually die, “one hell of a price” to pay for putting a million-dollar band in a dollar-ninety-eight airplane. That price was quantified by a headline two days later in the Dallas Morning News: LYNYRD SKYNYRD IS DECEASED.
EPILOGUE
A SORT OF HEREDITARY OBLIGATION
I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, THE SOUND AND THE FURY
Although even the NTSB report called it a miracle that more had not perished in the swamps of Gillsburg, the death of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s beating heart and three others who were perhaps the most innocent and well-liked among the inner circle made the tragedy almost unspeakably sad. Ed King once recalled, “I was making dinner [and] my mother called me…. She had heard the news first. And I flipped on the TV, saw a little bit, then got in the car and went straight to Mississippi. I went to visit everybody in the hospital. And then I went to Ronnie’s funeral after that, then I just drove home, all in a daze.” He says now: “When those guys told me about what happened on the plane, I couldn’t imagine going through that. You can survive something like that, but you’ll never be the same. I knew, and they knew, that they’d live with it every day of their lives.”
Alex Hodges, who had booked every Skynyrd tour except that last, fatal one, heard about the crash on the radio and thought of the conversation he’d had with Ronnie about the plane. “I was devastated of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder why he had gotten on that flight. I was angry at him for doing it. Then I blamed myself for not telling him, ‘Don’t do it!,’ because Ronnie listened to me. He respected me. He relied on me to be straight with him. And in that case, I failed him. I did.
Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars Page 28