I was about to start celebrating my birthday. But instead, I ran a mile through the snow to the 14th Street Bridge.
There was a plane down in the Potomac, amid all our pacific marble monuments.
I was working as a reporter at the Time magazine DC bureau that snowy January night in 1982, and I ran and slipped and slid through the frosted downtown streets in my fancy Italian stiletto boots. Once I reached the bridge, I asked a police officer if I could sit in his car for a few minutes to ward off frostbite.
A plane had gone into the Potomac shortly after taking off from Washington National Airport, as it was known then. The Air Florida Boeing 737-200 jet, with 74 passengers and five crew members on board, had fallen victim to a series of pilot errors. The crew had failed to properly clear the ice from the wings and failed to abandon take-off even though they had detected a problem with the plane’s power.
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It fell out of the grey mist, crashing through several cars and a truck on the bridge, shearing off 97 feet of guardrail, disappearing into the frozen Potomac. It sank beneath the ice floes with only the tail still showing. Divers found many of the passengers still strapped in their seats. Only four passengers and a flight attendant survived. Four motorists on the bridge died and one passenger who initially survived drowned trying to save others.
I was remembering that dreadful January night as I watched the TV coverage of the Army helicopter that collided with an American Airlines jet arriving from Kansas on Wednesday, with 67 people dead – including the three soldiers on the Black Hawk and a vibrant group of young US and Russian figure skaters on the plane. There were no survivors.
Experts, like Capt Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, talked about the trickiness of flying low over water at night. “Night-time always makes things different about seeing other aircraft – basically all you can do is see the lights on them,” he said.
Once more, it looked like human error. This time, the initial reporting indicated, the helicopter may have been flying higher than its approved flight zone, and there was a paucity of staffing at the airport’s air traffic control tower.
I was haunted by the echoes of the Air Florida crash. A reporter who covered that earlier disaster wrote a story at the time that captured a chilling aspect of a wintry crash into the Potomac.
Writing on the front page of the New York Times, David Shribman pointed out that the horror of the scene was amplified by the silence that followed the deafening roar of the plane falling out of the sky.
The plane’s engine drowned out the sound of screaming from the motorists on the bridge. And then there was a profound hush once Air Florida’s Flight 90 skidded and sank into the water.
“There were no sounds of panic, only an eerie silence and long, slender fissures in the ice, all pointing to a torn oval of water,” Shribman wrote.
The river swallowed up everything. The pain was frozen and mute.
The same shocking stillness happened Wednesday night with the plane arriving from Wichita. There was a fiery collision and then the Potomac became an icy morgue. Terror and death were muffled by frozen water. The sound of silence was unbearably sad.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
