Last Monday morning, pro golfer Payne Stewart awoke with the world on a string. He was to fly from his home in Orlando, Fla., eager to scout a site in Dallas that might be used for his fledgling golf-course-design business. Then on to Houston for the Tour Championship, a prestigious, season-crowning showdown among an elite field of the year's Top 30 money winners. Buoyed by a religious faith to which his young children had led him, Stewart, 42, was happier than friends had ever seen him. And thanks largely to a June victory at the U.S. Open, he was having the best year of his golfing career. Wouldn't it be great, he confided to a friend the evening before his trip, if he could cap it with another victory? Before leaving his house for the airport, he took a few moments for his daily Bible study, reading from John 3:8, in which Jesus reminds Nicodemus, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth."
Only a couple of hours later, on the way from Orlando to Dallas, Stewart's private jet went astray on a ghostly journey that ended some 850 miles to the northwest. The jet, carrying Stewart, his agents Robert Fraley and Van Arden, golf-course designer Bruce Borland and the jet's two pilots, plowed nose-first into a farm in rural Mina, S.D. The crash left their remains entombed in a 30-ft. by 40-ft. pit of muddy pasture. "It's like an archaeological dig," said Bob Benzon, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator leading the recovery. "We have to go down layer by layer." So far, the digging in the mud--and in the records of the jet and its flight--has only deepened the mystery of the tragedy.
Stewart's twin-engine Learjet 35 left Orlando International Airport promptly at 9:19 a.m. and 25 minutes later radioed that it had leveled off at 39,000 ft. Shortly afterward, though, air-traffic controllers noticed that the plane had climbed well above its assigned altitude. Controllers repeatedly tried to contact the pilots for an explanation but got no reply. At that point, the Federal Aviation Administration enlisted the help of the Air Force. Several F-16s were dispatched to check on the errant jet. It also missed the left turn it was scheduled to make toward Texas, and instead continued heading north. Though President Clinton was told about the situation and has the authority to order a "derelict airborne object" shot down if it threatens public safety, the attendant warplanes were unarmed.
At 11:09 a.m., with the plane soaring past 44,000 ft., Air Force Captain Chris Hamilton steered his F-16 within 50 ft. of the Lear, close enough to signal the pilots. Though the passenger jet's exterior appeared intact, its cockpit windows were obscured by what looked to be a "light coat of frost." Over the next two hours, four other F-16s shadowed the plane. By then, the roving aircraft had made the news. Stewart's Australian-born wife Tracey heard it on a TV news report and tried in vain to call her husband on his cell phone. At about 1:24 p.m., the plane fell to earth at 600 m.p.h. and disappeared from radar.