During those first few days some officials worried aloud about the accident's effect on nature, but the swamp was not so fragile as that, and quickly resumed its usual life. All that marked the surface was a fractured engine, a few dead fish, some jet fuel, and a scattering of personal papers, clothes, and twisted pieces of aluminum-the stuff of tragedy. Their remains lay in a shallow, watery crater filled with liquid mud and grass. The airplane did not sink mysteriously into the swamp, as reports later suggested, but shattered as it hit the surface with the furious force of a fast dive.īy the time Walton Little felt the shock wave, everyone aboard was dead-two pilots, three flight attendants, and 105 passengers. When it hit the Everglades, it was banked vertically to the right and pointed nearly straight down. The airplane was a twin-engine DC-9 painted the colors of ValuJet, an aggressive young discount airline based in Atlanta. I do not see any smoke, but I saw a tremendous cloud of mud and dirt go into the sky when it hit." No engines on the wing, two engines in the rear. I won't tell you it's a seven-twenty-seven, but it's that type aircraft. It is larger than an executive jet, like a Learjet." You said it looked like a seven-twenty-seven that went down?" The plane was sideways before it went out of my sight on the horizon about a mile from me." "I heard the impact, and I saw dirt and mud fly in the air. Did you see flames and stuff come up, sir?" I thought it was an aircraft from an air show or something, and." After telling the dispatcher about the crash and reading off his latitude and longitude, he said, "I'm in a bass boat on the canal. I was already thinking that I needed to get my cellular phone out of the storage compartment and call 911, but I wanted to assure myself of what I was doing because it is against the law to make false calls to 911. I stood there for just a moment to consider that it really did happen. I was in disbelief that the crash had occurred.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |