The roar, an eerie silence, then panic—and heroism
Flurries of thick, wet snow swirled through the streets of Washington last Wednesday, clogging traffic and slowing down pedestrians to a labored trudge. As the snow piled up, Government offices and private businesses closed early and sent their workers home. By midafternoon, traffic on the bridges over the Potomac River that link the capital with its Virginia suburbs had already slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, Washington National Airport had just reopened after having been shut down by the snowfall for two hours. At 3:59 p.m., Air Florida's Flight 90 to Tampa, a Boeing 737 with 74 passengers aboard, began rolling down the airport's main runway for takeoff.
Lloyd Creger, an administrative assistant in the Justice Department, was inching along the northbound span of the 14th Street Bridge in his Chevrolet station wagon when he heard the roar of Flight 90's engines. He thought nothing of it; hundreds of planes every day take off from National and head out over the bridge. But this time was different. Creger watched in horror as the blue-and-green jetliner suddenly appeared out of the gray mist. The plane slammed into the crowded bridge, smashed five cars and a truck and then skidded into the frozen river. "It was falling from the sky, coming right at me," recalls Creger. "It hit the bridge and just kept on going like a rock into the water." He remembers that the plane's nose was tilted up when its tail crashed into the bridge, as if the pilot "was trying like hell to get that jet up."
For a moment, there was silence, and then pandemonium. Commuters watched helplessly as the plane quickly sank beneath the ice floes; only its tail remained visible. A few passengers bobbed to the surface; some clung numbly to pieces of debris while others screamed desperately for help. Scattered across the ice were pieces of green upholstery, twisted chunks of metal, luggage, a tennis racquet, a child's shoe. On the bridge, a red flatbed truck with a 20-ft. crane was knocked on its side; the arm of the crane swung over the water. Two of the cars were flattened like tin cans; a brown Ford held the body of a man who had been decapitated when the roof was sheared off by the plane.
Within minutes, sirens began to wail as fire trucks, ambulances and police cars rushed to the scene. A U.S. Park Police helicopter hovered overhead to pluck survivors out of the water. Six were clinging to the plane's tail. Dangling a life preserver ring to them, the chopper began ferrying them to shore. One woman had injured her right arm, so Pilot Don Usher lowered the copter until its skids touched the water; his partner, Eugene Windsor, scooped her up in his arms. Then Priscilla Tirado, 23, grabbed the preserver, but as she was being helped out of the icy river by Fellow Passenger Joseph Stiley, she lost her grip. Lenny Skutnik, a clerk for the Congressional Budget Office who was watching from the shore, plunged into the water and dragged her to land. But the most notable act of heroism was performed by one of the passengers, a balding man in his early 50s. Each time the ring was lowered, he grabbed it and passed it along to a comrade; when the helicopter finally returned to pick him up, he had disappeared beneath the ice (See ESSAY).