Whenever an airliner goes down, this time Air France 447, I feel compelled to tell again my experience in an airliner that was about to crash, partly in tribute to those lost, and partly as a kind of balm offered to those who grieve the lost.
My experience began early on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, when two chartered DC-3 airliners took off from the Abilene, Texas, airport, carrying the Abilene High football team to a playoff game in El Paso, 444 miles to the west. I was 15 years old, a sophomore, on the second DC-3, last seat on the right.
I loved airplanes, and this was my first flight on a big airplane. The DC-3, an historic airplane, was propeller-powered, two engines, capacity 27. I loved to go out to the airport to watch them land and take off. Blue flame shot from the exhausts when the pilot cranked the engines and they caught. I paid attention to every detail of boarding, preparation, taxi and takeoff.
About an hour into the flight, I knew we were approaching Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene. I got up from my seat and asked the two guys on the other side of the aisle – one of them was Graham Holland, a big tackle – if I could look out their window at Webb Air Force Base, which I knew was below. I was standing, looking out the window, when, with no sense of time passing, or of anything happening, I found myself spread-eagled on the ceiling of the airplane. My arms and legs were glued flat to the ceiling, and I could not move them. My eyes were frozen open; I could not close them.
Directly below me was the window, and below the window was the ground: brown, West Texas rangeland. The land was rising toward me, quickly, accelerating, and I could not look away. I could not move. In the next instant, with no sense of time passing, or anything having happened, I found myself on the floor of the airplane. On top of me was Graham Holland, and assorted items from trays and overhead bins, including a weird piece of equipment that, loving airplanes, I recognized.
It was a long, square stick, maybe four feet long, red and white with gradation marks painted in black. It was the stick that, at the airport, they lowered into the wing tanks to measure fuel amounts. I thought: this stick belongs on the outside of the airplane. If it's on the outside, that must mean that I am on the outside, which means I must be dead.
But I wasn't. After several silent seconds, we started picking ourselves up. It was very quiet on the DC-3. We realized we were still flying. We found our seats and very soon, on the intercom, came the voice of the pilot, Charles L. Kageler. He told us we had been in a near-collision with another plane, which he believed was a military jet from Webb AFB. He said he had had to drop his airplane suddenly, that we had fallen about a thousand feet, but that we were okay, flying straight and level and climbing back up to altitude.
Also aboard the plane was Abilene Reporter-News sports writer Fred Sanner. His story about the near-miss led the front page in Saturday morning's Reporter-News. Details: Kageler saw the jet (I was looking out the same side of our plane, but didn't see the other plane), cut power to both engines and rolled the 25,000-pound DC-3 hard left, essentially standing the airplane on its left wingtip. We dropped straight down, which was what glued me to the ceiling. He said the other airplane missed us by about 25 feet. I had a huge bump on my head, and my name was in the story. The only other injury was a sprained ankle. The headline: "Tragedy Brushes Close to Eagle Plane."
We flew on to El Paso, played Ysleta High School the next day, beat them, 40-6, and flew back to Abilene without incident. But everyone on board that DC-3 on that Friday had become members of a club. As a member, I knew three things about being on board a plane that is about to crash. One, the ground really does come up to get you. Two, your life does pass before your eyes. I was only 15, so there wasn't much on the reel, but I saw it all. Three, there was no panic, no terror, on the airplane. No one made a sound, during or after the event.
I am glad to know that, when I read about flights like Air France 447. I have evidence from a plunging airliner to suggest that the brain is a logical instrument and wants to put patterns on all the data it receives. But on the DC-3, data was coming too fast, and didn't make any sense when compared to all known data. There literally was not time to understand, to be afraid, or to experience terror. I wonder also if the brain doesn't have emergency circuits to protect itself, and its host, from panic, or terror, by triggering distractions like your life passing before your eyes. In those seconds, you either get out of it, or you don't. I got out of it. Another few seconds, we would have hit. Either way, I am spared the indignity of terror.
In January, when US Air Capt. Chesley Sullenberger landed his airliner in the Hudson River, passengers reported a quiet calm all the way down. I would attribute that to brains searching for a pattern. How much time elapsed between the beginning and the end of the event on Flight 447? Impossible to say, but possible to believe, believe me, that it was over before anybody knew.
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