The lost souls of N47BA

The plane rotated up and streaked into the azure Florida sky at 9.19 a.m. Within minutes, the air traffic controllers in Jacksonville were monitoring the flight.

Because the crew had filed an instrument flight plan, controllers would be following their movements from Orlando all the way to Love Field in Dallas. They were headed northwest towards a VOR - a stationary navigational device that sends out a Morse signal - in north Florida. From there, they would turn almost due west for the long leg to Dallas.

As the flight approached Gainesville, an air traffic controller's voice came over the Learjet's radio:

"Lear Four Seven Bravo Alpha. Jacksonville Center. Climb and maintain flight level three niner zero."

"Three nine oh. Bravo Alpha," co-pilot Stephanie Bellegarrigue (27), acknowledged. Pilot Michael Kling (43), began nosing the plane up toward 39,000 feet.

That response would be the last anyone would receive from Bravo Alpha.

At 9.34 the Jacksonville controller tried to re-establish radio contact in regard to the planned turn west. "November Four Seven Bravo Alpha. Contact Jacksonville Center on one three five point six five."

Nothing.

Instead of turning at the VOR, the plane kept climbing and holding that north-westerly course.

Over the next three hours, Monday, Oct 25th, 1999, it became apparent that what had happened over north Florida was that the plane, for whatever reason, had lost cabin pressure, and the pilots, for whatever reason, were unable to correct that rapidly fatal circumstance. Payne Stewart and the five others quickly succumbed to hypoxia, or oxygen starvation.

An alarm sounded when the air pressure level inside the cabin plunged. Stewart and the others were startled by their eyes watering and popping out of their sockets. Dust swirled about the little cabin, and the temperature plunged quickly to well below freezing. Within a matter of seconds, water vapour inside the cabin condensed as fog, and the windows began frosting over.

The passengers began experiencing hot and cold flashes and the feeling of ants crawling across their skin. Stewart, no doubt, curiously noticed the skin beneath his fingernails turning blue and his senses of touch and pain diminishing as dizziness, blurred vision and slurred speech gave way to a moment of euphoria before he lost consciousness. In short order, his oxygen-deprived heart shut down in a fatal coronary.

Within minutes, the reigning US Open champion, his two agents, a golf architect and the two pilots died, essentially, in their sleep.

Aviation officials refer to humans aloft as "souls". The irony is that probably before N47BA had even crossed into the southwest corner of Georgia, the six "souls" had departed the craft, leaving six frozen cadavers to endure a bizarre trek through America's heartland on a three-hour ride to oblivion in a field in South Dakota.

At 10:08, Eastern time, at the FAA's request, two US air force F16 fighter jets scrambled from Tyndall air force base to overtake and visually inspect the unresponsive Learjet.

Ten minutes later, the Tyndall jets deferred to an Eglin air force base jet that was aloft on a routine training manoeuvre over the Florida panhandle. Capt Chris Hamilton (32), topped off his tanks from an airborne fuel tanker, then sped north at 600 m.p.h. for 50 minutes, finally overtaking the craft as it approached Memphis, Tennessee.

"When I closed in, I expected to just look in the cockpit and make eye contact with the pilot and get a thumbs-up that everything was okay," Hamilton would recount months later. "I was figuring it was just a radio malfunction or something. I never expected to see anything as catastrophic as what I saw."

Flying alongside about 50 feet off the Learjet's left wing, Hamilton could see that the cockpit windows were frosted over completely, a certain sign of cabin depressurisation. Authorities said the plane continued cruising along the fixed-course setting and was gradually "porpoising" - dipping to 38,000 and peaking as high as 51,000 feet. There was no movement apparent inside the craft.

"It's a very helpless feeling to pull up alongside another aircraft," Hamilton said, "and realise the people inside that aircraft potentially are unconscious or in some other way incapacitated. And there's nothing I can do, even though I'm just 50 feet away, to help them at all."

Hamilton gave way to two more F-16s scrambled out of the Dakotas. They would escort the mute Learjet on the final segment of its doomed flight.

Larry Rinker, a journeyman pro who'd enjoyed an off-and-on friendship with Payne since they'd first earned their Tour cards in the 1981 spring qualifying school, strolled into a Hallmark store not far from his home in Winter Park, a tiny suburb of Orlando, at lunchtime that Monday. He was reaching for a card when his cell phone rang. It was his wife, Jan.

"Have you heard about this plane that's flying off course? There are a couple of air force F-16s flying alongside it . . . It's a Learjet, a private plane, headed for Dallas.' She needed to say no more. Rinker filled in the blank: "It's Payne."

Rinker had immediately drawn on a conversation with fellow pro Lee Janzen the previous day in the parking lot at the Disney World Classic. Just making small talk, Rinker had asked Janzen if he was flying with Payne, as he often did, to Houston for the Tour Championship that week.

Actually, Janzen had failed to make the field, but he'd replied only that Payne was going on Monday to take care of some sort of business in Dallas. When Jan told Rinker that a Lear bound for Dallas was in serious jeopardy, a vision of Payne seated in the plane raced into his mind's eye.

"I just hoped it wasn't him. We didn't know anything for sure at that time. I don't know why I said it, but I just said, `It's Payne'. So Jan called (tour pro Scott) Hoch and called me right back and said the Hochs think it is Payne's plane.

"I then called the commissioner (PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem) and got a secretary and said it was an emergency. I told her what I knew and she said the FAA already had called and that they think it's Payne's plane.

"SO now I'm just in shock. I remember looking down at the cards and I couldn't even go there. I mean, I couldn't even begin to think about getting a card for my wife. So I drove home, which was only a few minutes away.

"All this time the plane was still in the air and, on TV, they were talking about maybe having to shoot it down. They were concerned that it might hit a populated area. So this whole time, now, I'm hoping it's not Payne's plane. As I watched it for a while, nobody on CNN was saying it is Payne's plane. Then they say they think it is. I never thought things like, `Are there other golfers on the plane?' I still was hoping it wasn't his plane. But then they confirmed it and the plane crashed.

"I still had to pack to go to Mississippi the next morning. I began putting a few things together and then wandered back in where the TV was on."

On the screen was a still photograph of his friend, with the caption "Payne Stewart, 1957-1999".

"I just went into the garage and cried my eyes out."

Larry Guest/Universal Press Syndicate 2000

The Payne Stewart Story, by Larry Guest, is published by Stark Books & Woodford Press.