Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 107, Greencastle, Putnam County, 14 January 1982 — Page 2

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The Putnam County Banner-Graphic, January 14,1982

Jet crash death toll at 77

Divers resume grim search of icy Potomac

WASHINGTON (AP) Divers in thermal suits plunged into the ice-crusted Potomac River today in a grim search for scores of bodies entombed in the fuselage of a crashed jetliner. A police official estimated "the slow, tedious task” of recovery may take three days. The crash of a Florida-bound jet Wednesday killed 75 of the 80 people on the plane. District of Columbia police said said two other people were killed when the Air Florida plane broadsided cars as they inched across the 14th Street Bridge laden with rush-hour traffic. The impact sheared the tops off some of the cars.

Rescue workers moved an injured motorist toward an evacuation helicopter on the 14th Street bridge in Washington, D.C. The motorist was one of several injured when vehicles were struck by an Air Florida jet that plunged into the Potomac River. (AP Laserphoto)

'I knew we weren't going to make it'

WASHINGTON (AP) Joseph Stiley turned to his secretary in the seat beside him as the Air Florida plane reached the top of its arc and started falling. “We’re not going to make it,” he told her. “We’re going in.” Stiley, one of five known survivors aboard the Boeing 737, said he knew the flight bound from Washington National Airport to Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was in trouble before the plane even got into the air. “I figured I had taken one airplane ride too many,” he said. "I had a pretty good indication things weren’t going right when we started down the runway. I think it might have been just a little bit heavy from the ice.” Stiley, 42, of Alexandria, Va., was hospitalized with two broken legs at National Hospital for Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation in Arlington, Va. His secretary, Patricia “Nicki” Felch of Herndon, Va., was listed in serious condition at Washington Medical Center.

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“We expect the recovery to be a slow, tedious task, taking anywhere from one to two to three days perhaps,” said James Shugart, a D.C. police inspector. “We want to make the recovery as quickly as possible, but you must keep in mind the fact that weather conditions are such that they are not conducive to rapid recovery .” Francis McAdams, head of the National Transportation Safety Board team of investigators assembling at the site, said: “They may have to lift the wreckage before they get to the bodies, it’s my understanding.” Divers hit the water not long after daybreak. A huge con-

“I know that we did not have the takeoff speed,” he said, explaining that he has both an instrument and commerical pilot’s license and had flown several times on Boeing 7375. “It didn’t climb like a normal 737 does,” he said. “We were out of runway, and when we reached that point, I knew we weren’t going to make it.” Stiley said ground crews “de-iced” the plane three times during the two hours it held at the gate while the airport was closed because of heavy snow. The plane was towed to the runway by a tractor after it wasn’t able to taxi out on its own because of poor traction on the ice, he said. Still, Stiley said, he was not worried; he had seen other airliners take off in similar conditions. But as it began its takeoff roll the plane did not seem to have the speed it needed, either because of poor traction or ice on its wings, he said.

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struction crane was being assembled on the bridge. McAdams said when the wreckage is recovered, it will be put on a barge or towed to shore, whichever is easier. “And if necessary, it will be brought down here to one of the hangars and perhaps a mockup might have to be made,” he said. The NTSB “go team” of investigators set up shop at nearby National Airport. Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis; Sen. John Warner, RVa.; and Virginia’s governor-elect, Charles Robb, visited the crash site early in the day. At least five people were plucked from the fragments of the plane or from the river water, cold enough to kill in minutes. The Boeing 737, carrying 75 passengers and five crew members, took off from National Airport, clipped a span of the 14th Street Bridge, then toppled into the river barely 100 yards from a second span crowded with commuters headed home to Virginia in the driving snow. Ira Furman, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said there was no hint why Air Florida Flight 90 to Tampa and Fort Lauderdale crashed, but one of the survivors said he had an uneasy feeling from the start. “I had a pretty good indication things weren’t going right when we started down the runway,” said Joseph Stiley, 42, a licensed private pilot from Alexandria, Va. “I think it might have been just a little bit heavy from the ice.” The airport control tower reported no distress calls from the doomed plane during its few seconds of flight Wednesday. The last crash of a commercial plane at National, a smallish 40-year-old airport snuggled on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, was in 1949. Furman said federal safety investigators “will be looking at the weather, human factors, everything.” One of the first steps will be to examine cockpit flight recorders once the split pieces of the two-engine jet are fished from the river, hopefully today. The blue and green airliner had just taken off from National Airport, where it had been serviced by American Airlines. The airport had been closed temporarily to clear snow from the runway until about an hour before the aircraft took off. Visibility was about a half mile, close to the minimum. Three inches of snow had fallen, and it was snowing heavily at the time of the crash. Frank Taylor, director of the National Transportation Safety Board’s bureau of accidents investigations, said the de-icing solution sprayed on the plane during a turn-around from Florida was impounded. He said samples also were taken from fuel tanks used to supply the plane. Among other areas to be examined: weather and runway conditions, the weight of the plane and the conditions of its engines. Divers and others had managed to pull only nine bodies from the plane’s wreckage or from the river water during the four hours before darkness and floating shards of ice made their work impossible. “It’s too dangerous to dive down there tonight,” said one police diver. ‘ ‘There’s no use in losing good divers. ’ ’ Police boats, a Coast Guard vessel and a barge worked into the night, cruising slowly through the river while crew members poked through the ice with boathooks. A helicopter circled overhead playing its searchlight on the ice.

A deafening roar...

then an eerie silence on the Potomac River ice

c. 1982 N.Y. Times ARLINGTON, Va. and then, suddenly, there was silence. There was no sound at all, those who watched said later, as the Air Florida 737 jetliner glided onto the river, skidded across the graynce and sank slowly into the icy waters. Behind it, a 10-wheel truck, its top sheared off, teetered on the bridge over the Potomac River. A half-dozen cars, their trunks and hoods crushed, were strewn across the roadway. And through a 35-foot gash in the bridge railing only a slender piece of the crushed airliner was visible. There were no sounds of panic. There was only an eerie silence and long, slender fissures in the ice, all pointing to a torn oval of water. “I heard it coming,” said Lloyd Creger, a Justice Department employee who was traveling along the north span of the 14th Street Bridge only moments before the crash. “I couldn’t see anything. It was snowing. Then I saw the plane coming out of the sky. The nose was up, the tail was down. It was so loud I couldn’t hear myself scream.” “And then,” Creger added, still shaken by what he had witnessed, “there was no sound. You couldn’t even hear the plane go into the water. ’ ’ After that silence came the cacophony of rescue: shouts for help, shouts of comfort; the whap of helicopter rotors and the blare of sirens. Municipal, parks and military emergency squads moved into action. Hampered by the cold and snow, and prevented from moving swiftly to the crash scene by the ice, they searched for survivors in the section of river between the two spans of the bridge. For those in the water it was not only a struggle for survival from the plane crash, but also a struggle for survival

Office worker saves flight attendant

WASHINGTON (AP) Lennie Skutnik couldn’t believe rescuers were not doing more to save a young woman struggling for her life among the wreckage of a downed airliner in the icy Potomac River. So, when she “gave out” and lost her grip on a life preserver dangling at the end of a rope from a rescue helicopter overhead, “I jerked off my coat and boots and dove in after her,” he said. Moments later, about 10 yards from shore. Skutnik reached Kelly Duncan, a flight attendant aboard the Air Florida plane that crashed into a bridge and plunged into the ice-covered river. “I think she was out,” Skutnik, 28, of Lorton, Va., recalled after he was treated for exposure and released from National Hospital for Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation in nearby Arlington, Va. “Her eyes rolled back, and she just started to go under when I grabbed her,” he said. “The bottom portion of her body was in the water at least 30 minutes.” Skutnik struggled to keep the woman afloat as he pushed and pulled her toward the shore, where another bystander on the bank lifted her out of the water. Ms. Duncan of Miami, described as being in her early 20s, and three of the four Air Florida passengers who survived the crash were taken to the same hospital, all of them suffering from hypothermia a lowering of the body temperature due

Bodies still strapped in their seats could be seen in the river moments after the 4:04 p.m. crash. Rescuers threw ropes and life rings from the bridge and from helicopters or attempted to reach the wreckage in rubber rafts. Stewardess Kelly Duncan was pulled from the river by a bystander. “The plane started to shake and the next thing I knew, I was in the water,” she told the doctor who treated her for hypothermia, a severe loss of body heat that afflicted survivors pulled from the river. Airman Terence Bell saw the plane coming down as he headed onto the bridge from his Air Force job at the nearby Pentagon. “I saw him coming in too low,” Bell said. “The midsection of the plane smacked the bridge. The nose went info the water and sank right away. The tail skidded off the bridge into the river where it floated atop the water for about 20 minutes.” The airliner struck a guard rail on the bridge and sheared the tops off five cars and struck a truck, witnesses said. The bridge, known in Washington as the 14th Street Bridge, is actually three spans. All were crowded with traffic because federal workers on both sides of the river in Washington and in Virginia had been sent home early because of the snowstorm.

against the elements. Two firemen dived into the water and grabbed a woman who had moved quickly from the wreckage. A park policeman hauled a few more by cable. A helicopter dragged a number of survivors ashore, only to lose them and to try again. Rowboats were stuck in the ice. Only an airboat moved toward the bridge. Two firemen, their red-and-yellow outfits nearly shrouded by the deepening sky, tugged life rafts toward the scene. Their movement was agonizingly slow. By the time the sun had set, the surrounding bridges and the Virginia shore were lit with red torches, but there was little more that the rescue squads could do. Scores of ambulances slid through the slush, moving past the crushed cars and the remains of the plane that were tossed across the bridge. Dozens more ambulances were parked by the shore, and helicopters hovered above. Meanwhile, federal and other workers, told to leave their jobs early because of a snowstorm that struck the capital area Wednesday paralyzing the area’s commuter thoroughfares, streamed out of Washington. Within an hour, the area around the crash scene was crowded with spectators, some of them commuters who had no idea what had caused the delay in their trip home. The confusion was-compounded by a derailment of a Metro train under Washington’s Mall near the Smithsonian Institution. Throughout the rescue effort, emergency squads worked against a backdrop of blowing snow, the final pushes of a winter storm that left as much as five and a half inches in the Washington area. As the evening progressed, scores of rescue vehicles descended on the scene.

to exposure. “If any of them had spent any more time in the water, they would have died,” said Dr. Richard Schwartz, the medical disaster coordinator at the hospital. He said three passengers and Ms. Duncan were responding well to treatment and were out of danger. Skutnik, an office service assistant with the Congressional Budget Office, and four others left their jobs early because of heavy snow in the Washington area and were driving home together. Backed up in rush-hour traffic crossing the 14th Street Bridge between Washington and Virginia, Skutnik did not see the plane crash into the span and then into the river. But after crossing the bridge. Skutnik and his companions parked their vehicle and went to the river’s bank. "Just because we are human. I guess, we stood around and watched for a while.” When he saw Ms. Duncan desperately trying to keep a grasp on the life preserver, ”1 felt so helpless; I couldn’t do anything," he said. “Nobody seemed to be able to do anything. Any ropes that people had were too short to reach out there.” Skutnik then saw her lose her grip. "She just gave out," he said, adding that he could not understand why rescuers near him on the bank did not go into the water to try and save her. “I know how to swim and that’s all you have to do," he said.