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Some three miles north of the airport, in the village of Berg, Mrs. Joseph Verhoeven saw the plane pitch and yaw. "It was so low," she said, "I could see people looking at me from inside the plane and gesturing. I held my hand up to them. Then the airplane stopped right in the air. It was as if it were hanging there on something. The whole thing was shaking terribly, as if it were struggling to get started moving again. But something was holding it back. Then an amazing thing happened. The plane began to point to the sky. The whole nose began to rise upward. In a few seconds, the plane was straight up, absolutely straight — pointed right to heaven. It fell then like a stone, straight down, until it hit the ground. I could see the people inside waving at me, and I kept waving back."
Epitaph. The rescue squads were too late; the wreckage was complete. Charred, dismembered bodies were strewn everywhere. Some were found speared in the earth, others with their heads bent low as if they had been given last-minute emergency warning. Here and there were couples locked in frantic embrace. A farmer working in the field was killed, another severely injured.
It would probably be months before investigators — helped by U.S. experts —could piece together the causes of the disaster, but the facts could scarcely lighten the burden of the tragedy itself. It was proud Sabena's worst disaster, and the first crash involving a regularly scheduled commercial Boeing 707 (two other 707 crack-ups occurred during training flights). No one life could claim a value above another, but the deaths of brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and sons dealt one of the worst blows to whole families of any crash ever. In all, there were multiple deaths in ten skating families. Their epitaph was told in the tears of thousands of other skaters around the globe, and by three pairs of melted skates that dangled all day from a crippled aileron in the sun.