Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds: The Tragedy and Triumph of ASA Flight 529 Hardcover - 2001

Excerpt

6:45 to Impact. Robin Fech pushed the PA button, turned to face her twenty-six passengers, and said, “The cockpit crew has confirmed we have an emergency. We have an engine failure.” She announced that the plane was headed back to Atlanta. She sounded firm even if frightened.

Chuck Pfisterer, in 6A, thought, Yeah you’ve got an engine problem all right!

Fech reiterated that the plane could fly on one engine. She also told passengers they needed to prepare, just in case. She did not deliver the lengthy formal emergency announcement she’d learned in training. She’d always thought it too long, slow, and boring. But she delivered the essence of that announcement, in her own way.

Make certain your seat belt is low and tight, she said.

Place your feet flat on the floor and review your emergency card.

She explained the brace positions. For all but a few passengers sitting by the bulkheads, that meant crossed wrists against the seat back in front of them, forehead pressed against the wrists. Fech insisted that each passenger demonstrate the brace position.

“You’ll have to prove this to me,” she said.

She asked if there were any questions. No one had any. She cleared off the kitchen galley and then moved up the aisle, saying, “Let me see it.” As passengers assumed brace positions, Fech lifted an elbow here, pushed down a head there. She had been trained to do it. She just couldn’t believe she now had to do it.

She had convinced most passengers that a safe landing was possible. In the fourth row, Ed Gray, on his way to Muscle Shoals to schmooze DuPont with his colleague across the aisle in 3C, Barney Gaskill, imagined a foam-covered landing strip and a bouncy ride in.

In Row 9, the young deputy, Tod Thompson, thought back to childhood fears. He wrestled with rationalizations. A roller-coaster ride once scared him as a boy. But he’d held on then, things had turned out okay, and he’d thought at the time, That wasn’t so bad, was it? It will be the same thing now.

Thompson craned his neck to see the left engine. A few of the left-side window shades in the middle rows hadn’t been shut. Thompson saw the twisted metal. His partner, Charlie Barton, looked out to the left wing, too. He saw what Thompson saw, and spoke not a word.

Charlie Barton went quiet, totally quiet.

Thompson didn’t want others in the plane to know his fear, least of all Charlie Barton.

The plane shook in the clouds, side to side. Thompson reminded himself to think like a lawman: Stay clear-headed! Do what you’re told! He tightened his seat belt, listened for the flight attendant’s next words. Then he closed his right-side window shade, as if the sky would no longer exist if he couldn’t see it.

***

In the seventh row, David McCorkell believed the plane would land just as the flight attendant said it would. Once, McCorkell had been a passenger on a plane that landed in a blizzard as fire trucks lined the runway. When that plane landed safely, every passenger applauded.

Air travel was a way of life for McCorkell. He left home in Minnesota each week on Sunday or Monday and flew to another city to train grocery chains how to use software programs. Then he flew home on Friday, washed his clothes, paid his bills, and started the cycle all over again.

This was David McCorkell, vice president of training, his life and his livelihood one and the same. At thirty-seven and twice divorced, he had the worn appearance of a man who no longer had the time, or inclination, to dream big dreams: a thick Teddy Roosevelt—type mustache, big enough to hide behind, eyeglasses that sometimes slid down the bridge of his nose, and shoulders that slouched.

The plane’s shuddering tested McCorkell’s nerves. He wanted to see the left engine. He leaned into the aisle, looked past Chuck Pfisterer in Row 6 out at the left wing. He saw the propeller blades. They were dislodged and bent and he noticed that they weren’t turning.

The passengers’ silence made him tense.

He looked at his watch: 11:45 a.m. Central time. In Gulfport he had planned to rent a car and drive to Mobile, Alabama. But now that this plane was going back to Atlanta, he worried that he would lose a half-day’s billing. At eight thousand feet and dropping, his plane attempting to enter a right turn now, David McCorkell thought, I’m going to be out a couple hundred dollars.

The right engine, that’s the first noise Alan Barrington had noticed after the propeller shattered. Barrington sat on the right side, in 6C, behind the good engine. He figured the pilots must have turned it up a few notches to compensate for the dead left engine.

The right engine revved louder than before, and lonelier.

Barrington looked at his emergency card as he awaited his chance to demonstrate the brace position for the flight attendant. He read about flotation devices and exit rows. He looked at the little drawings on the card and thought, If we crash, this card won’t do me any good.

Barrington noticed that the man across the aisle, Chuck Pfisterer, could see out on the left wing. This was the same man who had sounded so distressed with the flight attendant moments ago, the man who had mistakenly sat in Barrington’s seat before the plane took off, about thirty minutes ago. Barrington thought he saw tears in this man’s eyes.

And that prompted a scary thought: He’s got a better view than I do, and he’s got tears in his eyes. . . .

Media reviews

Words like shattering and riveting don’t come close to capturing the impact of this fine book, the most powerful I’ve read in a very long time. The experiences of its heroes–and there is no better way to describe the men and women who populate its pages–will move and haunt for a good long while.” –Erik Larson, author of Isaac’s Storm

“I loved Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds. While reading it, there were times I became so fraught I thought I couldn’t go on, but I simply couldn’t tear myself away. Ultimately, this book is an ode to the beauty and dignity of the human spirit.” –Dominick Dunne

“Gary Pomerantz ventures where lesser writers might fear to go. Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds moves so surely through the story that the reader is left saddened but not horrified, and reminded of the essential humanity that can emerge in such moments of great drama.” –William Langewiesche, author of Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight

“What is it about the power of certain combinations of words to pull you in, to suck you in, so that you can’t turn the pages fast enough and the outside world falls away? Gary Pomerantz has written pages that leave you breathless; you tear through them like a late passenger sprinting down an airport terminal. When you pull up, you feel windblown, as if you’ve stood in front of a propeller plane revving up.” –Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock

“Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds has the power of myth and the immediacy of a next-door neighbor. Gary Pomerantz has performed a breathtaking feat: he has written a modern-day fable that’s somehow about each of us, our desire to fly, and our willingness to soar again. Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds will tap into your deepest dreams – and ultimately inspire you to make sure they come true.” –Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible

“There is an indescribable thrill while reading reporting like this. Fact by fact, one precious detail after another, all gathered by a reporter using his feet, Gary Pomerantz gives us flight attendant Robin Fech, seconds away from a crash, calling out, ‘brace position,’ right out of chapter one, page 23 of her manual. In the flames on the ground, she wanted to take a man’s sneakers off so she could pull off his pants. When she looked again, the sneakers were not there. They had melted onto the soles of his feet. This is how Gary Pomerantz reports his book and this is how chilling his facts make it.” –Jimmy Breslin