35 Miles from Shore (15 page)

Jeannie Larmony didn't have a problem locating her vest and removing it from the plastic pouch; she did have to unbuckle her seatbelt in order to reach under the seat. She put the vest on over her head while still seated. She was confused about what to do with the straps on the bottom of the vest. She looked up to see if she could find someone to assist her and was surprised to see two men standing in the aisle taking pictures. She watched incredulously as the two men worked their way up the aisle, stopping to take pictures of the two little girls, who were smiling and laughing and acting as if they were about to go swimming.

The two men taking pictures were not wearing life vests.
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It's quite possible that their motivation for taking such a risk had something to do with another picture taken aboard a plane. The picture in question had been taken aboard a hijacked plane. The photograph had been published in
Life
magazine a few months earlier. The amount of money paid to the amateur photographer who took the fuzzy photo received more publicity than the hijacking.

Rick Arnold had to get out of his seat to get his life jacket. Once he retrieved it, he had no problem removing the vest from the plastic cover and putting it on. About this time, Loretta turned to Rick
and asked him if he wanted to sit with her and Gene. Rick took the aisle seat next to Loretta. Loretta was sitting in the middle seat and Gene had the window seat. Rick fastened his seatbelt. He looked around the cabin at the other passengers. He saw the female flight attendant walking down the aisle with one of the little girls. He didn't see anyone taking pictures, but he did catch a glimpse of the cockpit through the opened cockpit door. What he saw alarmed him—flashing warning lights. It was then he realized the seriousness of the situation. He turned to his friend Gene. Gene hadn't seen the warning lights, but there was no concealing the concern on his face as he told Loretta that he loved her.

Emerson Ussery reached under his seat to extract the life vest from the pouch. He found the pouch but couldn't undo the strap. He got out of his seat and onto his knees but still couldn't unfasten the strap. Frustrated, he finally gave up and removed the vest from beneath the unoccupied seat next to him. After putting on his life vest, Emerson helped the woman sitting next to him and then assisted an elderly man and woman across the aisle in seats 2A and 2B. He was so busy helping other passengers with their life vests that he didn't check to see if he had his on properly. He more or less just put it on around his head and neglected to secure the straps around his waist. Not once did he think about the briefcase with the $350,000 in cash, which was still sitting under his seat. At this moment, the $20 life vest was more important.

When Emerson noticed the purser having trouble pulling the life raft from the closet, he offered to help, and the two of them managed to get the raft out of the closet and into the aisle. Emerson returned to his seat and fastened his seatbelt.
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Once they had the raft out of the closet, Hugh, Wilfred, and Tobias dragged the raft to the forward galley. Hugh examined the
raft package but couldn't find the inflation lanyard. He found the opening where the lanyard was supposed to be, but there was no handle. The raft had been packed incorrectly; the inflation lanyard was inside the protective bag that encased the raft and not accessible as it should have been. Hugh unfastened a few snaps from the raft case and found the lanyard. The lanyard was attached to a bundle of strings that had become entangled.

While Hugh worked on freeing the inflation lanyard, Tobias and Wilfred removed the girt bars from the cabin door and the galley door. The girt bar was a small metal bar that slid into two brackets attached to the floor. In the locked position, the girt bar provides automatic deployment of the emergency escape slide when the door is opened. Once the slide falls from the container, a crew member must then pull an inflation pin to inflate the slide.
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The procedure in a ditching was to remove the girt bar. The escape slides on the DC-9 had no quick disconnect. If a slide was deployed in a water landing, there was no quick means of detaching it from the aircraft. There was also the problem of having the slide getting in the way of deploying the life raft.

The life raft weighed 125 pounds and required two people to lift it. The plan was to toss the raft out the main cabin door. There was no raft tie-down. They would have to hold on to the mooring line or try to find something to tie it to once it was launched. Otherwise, the raft would float away from the aircraft and be of no use to anyone. All three men were preoccupied with the life raft. Margareth was standing near the front of the cabin assisting two elderly people with their life vests.

With the flight attendants preoccupied in the front of the cabin, there was little supervision in the back of the plane. A few passengers in back elected to not put on their life vests, apparently feeling that the whole exercise was an unnecessary inconvenience. They would soon realize their mistake.

T
WENTY SECONDS AFTER
B
ALSEY ANNOUNCED THAT
there was a possibility he might have to ditch, the San Juan controller suggested that he return to St. Maarten, stating that St. Maarten was closer. Balsey was understandably confused by the controller's suggestion. What Balsey didn't know was that he was talking to a new controller, one that had just started his shift and didn't know anything about the multiple landing attempts at St. Maarten. Balsey asked for the weather at St. Maarten, thinking that perhaps there had been a sudden improvement. After a brief delay the controller replied that the weather was not VFR (visual flight rules).

By this time, Balsey had completely taken over operation of the radio. He didn't want to waste time relaying information through Harry. There were other aircraft on the frequency, and Balsey suggested to the controller that they both switch to 121.5, the civilian emergency frequency. When Balsey was unable to raise the controller on 121.5, he returned to 125.0 and requested that the frequency be cleared of all other traffic. He also asked to have any vessels in the area notified of the possible ditching.

Balsey still wasn't ready to give up on trying to reach St. Croix. He asked the controller what runway they were using. The controller indicated that they were using runway nine, which was opposite of Balsey's inbound heading to the airport. After receiving a wind report of 070 at 10 knots, Balsey requested a straight in landing to runway 27. He still didn't have the approach charts for St. Croix. He had to ask the controller for the runway length and the VOR radial to the field.

While Balsey was getting the St. Croix approach information from the controller, Hugh Hart entered the cockpit and said there was some confusion in back about whose procedure they were supposed to use regarding the repositioning of the life raft. “Go with their procedures,” Balsey told Hugh. “I don't have time to teach school right now.” Hugh had apparently remembered something having been said about not repositioning the life rafts on the DC-9 due to a lack of a raft tie down. The ALM flight attendants, in fact, had been told by Chris Linder to not reposition the life rafts. The management of ALM, however, had countermanded that instruction because they didn't want to confuse their flight attendants, who were trained to reposition the life rafts on the ALM DC-8. Hugh returned to the cabin but left the cockpit door partially open so he could communicate with Balsey and Harry.

Balsey turned to Harry and told him that he intended to stay clean all the way to the airport, adding that he wasn't going to call for the gear until they were over the runway.
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He was going to keep flying until the plane fell out of the sky.

Passing through 1,200 feet, Balsey started to catch glimpses of the water. The more he saw, the more concerned he became. Huge swells rose and fell in all directions. It was the worst possible condition for ditching an aircraft. When Balsey looked over at Harry, he could tell that Harry was equally alarmed. Harry was staring straight ahead, transfixed by the swirling sea. Balsey felt that Harry was having a bad
case of tunnel vision. He had seen it before with students in training. When a pilot is given more information than he can process, his mind will focus on only one or two tasks while discarding all other input. A pilot who has an engine failure on takeoff, for example, may be so focused on the fact that he has just lost an engine that he'll forget to bring the gear up. Tunnel vision, or cognitive narrowing as it is also called, is a factor in many aviation accidents. Balsey could sense that he was quickly closing in on the same state. As he looked out at the white caps, he felt as if the weight of the aircraft and all of its passengers was resting on his shoulders. He had reached a point where one more piece of information, one more sensory input, one more decision, would have been enough to send his brain into information overload. He resigned himself to the fact that he was going to have to ditch the aircraft, and he immediately calmed down. He discarded all input that didn't have to do with flying the airplane. He slowed his thinking processes down until everything from that point on seemed to proceed in slow motion.

Still in and out of the clouds, Balsey had a flashback of a discussion he had had with an old Air Force buddy concerning ditchings. The man's name was Charles Harpool. Balsey remembered Harpool talking about problems the Air Force was having with aircraft that were forced to ditch. The planes almost always became submerged when they hit the water, Harpool had told him. He told Balsey that if he ever had to ditch an airplane to make sure he took a gyro with him, referring to the attitude indicator.
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That would at least provide an attitude reference that could help in preventing the plane from rolling over on its back.

At 500 feet they finally broke out below the overcast. The aircraft was still clean and flying at 160 knots. Balsey was thinking clearly now and he tried to determine the direction of the swell movement. He descended at hundred foot increments to improve his depth perception, all the while searching for any sign of land.

Hugh stuck his head into the cockpit. “What's our altitude?”

“Two hundred!” Harry yelled back.

“I'll give you a yell at the last second,” Balsey told Hugh. He turned to Harry and told him to run the ditching checklist. Harry looked for the emergency checklist but couldn't find it. The emergency checklist was a red-bordered, laminated, eight by ten checklist, normally carried in a holder near the first officer's left knee.
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Harry searched the holder but found only the normal checklist. As an instructor, Balsey made it a point to know every emergency checklist by memory. It was something he also required of his student captains. Balsey didn't have time to look for the checklist. He knew that he had to depressurize the aircraft and close the outflow valve. The outflow valve was a large circular valve on the aft fuselage that controlled the outflow of conditioned air. Pressurization of an aircraft works by pumping conditioned air into the cabin and controlling the rate at which the air is allowed to escape. If the outflow valve was left open when the plane hit the water, the water would quickly rush in through the open valve and hasten the sinking of the plane. Balsey asked Harry to depressurize the aircraft and close the outflow valve. When he saw that Harry was slow to respond, Balsey pointed to the correct switches. Harry reached up and shut off the two air conditioning packs. He then closed the outflow valve. There wouldn't be time to do anything else.
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At 1947:35, the San Juan controller told ALM 980 that they were thirty-six miles from St. Croix. The last transmission from ALM 980 was at 1947:40: “Nine eighty, roger...ah...we're ditching.” Other aircraft listening in on the communications would later comment on the calm in the voice of the pilot making the call.

Now that he was committed to ditching, Balsey lowered the flaps to fifteen degrees and slowed to 145 knots. At a hundred feet the low pressure lights came on again; this time they stayed on. Balsey immediately called for full flaps. Fifty degrees of flaps was like having two barn doors attached to the backs of the wings. The airspeed dropped off quickly from 140 knots to just over 90 knots. Any slower and the plane would have fallen out of the sky. But even at 90 knots it meant that the plane would strike the water at nearly 100 mph. Balsey reached up and turned the emergency power switch on. Now he had his gyro (the captain's attitude indicator was powered by the emergency bus). He reached up and flicked the seatbelt sign off and on three times to alert the cabin crew.
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Balsey would later say that he wouldn't have had time to make a PA announcement even if it had been working. Ten or fifteen seconds went by before the first engine flamed out. The second engine followed very shortly thereafter. Balsey picked out the back of a swell and angled toward it. He wanted to keep the aircraft flying as long as possible in an effort to slow the aircraft down before it entered the water.

Seconds before the aircraft struck the water, Balsey turned toward the cockpit door and shouted, “It's now, Hugh!” He grabbed the wheel with both hands and told Harry to “hold on tight.”

At 1948:40 (3:48
P.M
.), radar contact with ALM 980 was lost.
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