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At this point the Clipper was approaching ramp C4. It angled at about 45° to the left to join the taxiway in a short loop leading to the head of the runway. The Clipper had passed C3, which headed back toward the terminal in a difficult turn for a big plane. Another sharp turn onto the taxiway would be required. Pan Am officials were later to explain that the crew considered C-l inactive because it was blocked by aircraft and assumed that the final turn was the "third intersection" the tower meant the plane to take. Pan Am was only about 475 ft. away from its safe exit when all hell broke loose. Captain Grubbs and First Officer Bragg saw lights blurred by fog on the runway ahead of them. They thought the lights were stationary. But the glows loomed larger. They were moving.
"We are still on the runway," Grubbs shouted into his radio mike. "What's he doing? He'll kill us all!"*
"Get off! Get off!" yelled Bragg as Grubbs gunned his engines in a frantic effort to veer onto the grass and out of the path of the onrushing KLM. As the crew stared in horror, the nose of the KLM lifted sharply—but not high enough.
Bragg felt his craft shudder and heard a sound that one survivor described as being like "someone ripping a large piece of tape off the ceiling." From just two feet back of the cockpit to the tail, the entire top of the fuselage was gone. Both wings collapsed on the tarmac, engines still running. Bragg reached for the fire handles above his head. He grabbed only open sky. As the cockpit floor gave way, Captain Grubbs fell into the first-class compartment below, then somehow stumbled onto a wing and dropped to the ground. "Just to sink down in the green grass wet with rain was so heavenly," he said later. He might have stayed there—and died—but Purser Dorothy Kelly dragged him to safety.
Flash fires, dense smoke and a series of explosions wracked the stricken craft. Since the Clipper had been turning to its left, passengers on the right side had little chance. Unlike most air crashes, those seated up front were the lucky ones this time. For many, going first class was worth their life.
A few in back made it. Seated in row 34, Mrs. Floy Heck of Leisure World sat in a stupor until her husband Paul ordered: "Floy, get up!" He led her to the wing. She jumped, injuring her legs, and could not walk. "I kept praying and asked Jesus to help me, and I kept crawling away." She did not see her husband again until they were reunited in a U.S. hospital.
As people toppled from the upper level to the first-class compartment below, the Royal Cruise Line's Naik felt a body hit his head. His wife was motionless and bleeding from the temple. A mound of burning metal blocked a path to the gaping fuselage. Twice Naik tried to carry his wife over the barrier. Once an explosion blew him back. A second hurled him onto the wing. He rolled off to earth, but his wife was thrown backward. Someone yelled at him: "Get out of there! It's going to blow!" Watching the flames in frustration, he saw a white shirt under the plane, rushed toward it—and pulled his wife away.
As always in such mass tragedies, there were countless "ifs."