Almost two months ago, I walked away from an air crash that nobody should have survived. Our corporate jet collided midair, 37,000ft over Brazil, with a much larger commercial airliner. While I and the six others on the jet lived to tell the tale, the 154 people on the Brazilian airliner did not: they plunged to horrible deaths in the Amazon jungle.
I was sitting beside the left wing of the jet, where the impact occurred. A month later, I still hear that bang when I awake abruptly and ponder how it is that I am alive and the others are dead. We literally did not know what had hit us, or what we had hit, when the impact came, just before 4pm on September 29. Thirty minutes later, in a damaged aeroplane with a deteriorating wing – losing speed, altitude and time – we made a harrowing landing at a military base in the Amazon that nobody on board knew was there until it heaved into view, a gash in the jungle.
We spent three hours at the military base before we found out we had collided with a Boeing 737-800 bound southeast for Brasilia on the same path, and at the same altitude, as us. We were bound northwest for Manaus, the Amazon river city. The plan was to spend the night, get up at dawn to board a boat to watch the sunrise on the Amazon, then re-board the jet for the trip home to New York City.
The corporate plane was a beauty, a shiny new blue-and-white $25m Legacy 600 jet with 13 seats. I was in Brazil to write about Embraer, the aircraft manufacturer. David J Rimmer, the vice-president of the New York charter-jet company ExcelAire, asked me if I wanted to hitch a ride home on the plane, which his company had just taken delivery of at Embraer’s plant in Sao Jose dos Campos, near Sao Paulo. We would board the plane on Friday afternoon, head northwest into the Amazon for the overnighter at Manaus, then continue onward to the US. Also on board would be Rimmer’s colleague Ralph Michielli and two marketing executives: Henry Yandle, an American, and Daniel Bachmann, the son of American medical missionaries who had grown up in an Amazon river town near Manaus and who had suggested the side trip. “Sure, I’m always up for an adventure,” I told Mr Rimmer. That turned out to be quite an understatement.
In many people’s minds, a business jet is associated with corporate fat cats swilling champagne served by an air hostess with model looks. But the truth is, we were just working stiffs making a quick sightseeing stop before delivering an aeroplane to a company that had just bought it. We left Sao Jose around 2.10pm. An hour into the flight, I was studying a tourist map of Brazil. Ahead, we were approaching the edges of the Amazon jungle. Bachmann ran his finger along the paths of the rivers that descend from the high western mountains to form the great river basin. We were transfixed as he told Amazon tales from his childhood, of swimming in waters that teem with piranhas the size of poodles, with anacondas that can swallow a deer.
A little later I wandered up to the cockpit, whose door was ajar, and stood in the aisle behind the two pilots as the plane flew smoothly northwest. “She’s flying beautifully,” said the captain, Joe Lepore. Beside him, the co-pilot, Jan Paladino, kept his eyes on the controls. The altimeter read 37,000ft. (Later, the Legacy pilots would maintain that while their written flight plan called for the Legacy to drop to 36,000ft just after passing Brasilia, air-traffic control in Sao Jose overrode that plan and instructed the pilots to stay at 37,000ft – a command the pilots followed, according to international aviation procedures.)
Approaching unseen in the opposite direction, also at 37,000ft, was a Boeing 737-800 bound for Brasilia with 154 passengers aboard. I am not sure now how much time passed before the impact, but I do know it was enough time for me to take my laptop from its case and start transcribing interviews.
We flew on smoothly with only the insistent drone of the engines. And then “Bang!” Up front, Henry Yandle said: “We’ve been hit!” The noise was not “Boom!” Nor did I hear any roar of an approaching plane. I have been on an aeroplane that has been struck by lightning. I have flown in many military jets. I have never heard anything like this. I heard just a big metallic bang, the sort of noise your car might make if your tyre rim thumped into a pothole. Accompanying it was a concussive jolt. The plane did not lose balance or shudder. When I raised the shade, my heart sank. A 4ft section of the wing tip was shorn off, with just a jagged edge remaining. I looked up at the cockpit and tried to read the pilots’ body language. I saw two men – intense, alert, working in tandem like well-trained infantrymen. I saw no panic, but it was clear that we had an emergency. Mr Rimmer was crouched at the window, looking at the wing. “How bad is it?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, forming each word like a separate sentence.
On we flew. In the cockpit, the pilots battled damaged controls and scrutinised charts to find a landing strip in the darkening jungle below. None showed. Having tried and failed to establish contact with air-traffic control in Brasilia and Manaus, they radioed a “mayday” call that was acknowledged by a cargo plane in the vicinity. He told them to look for a once-secret and now-obscure military air base somewhere nearby. I saw Michielli at a window, studying the left wing and taking a succession of photos with his digital camera. He looked stricken. A row of rivets on the wing had popped and a section of skin was peeling off. Fuel was leaking and we were losing speed and altitude. Nobody shouted anything from the movies like “We’re going down,” but it was made clear that we were. We stowed bags under our seats and strapped ourselves in.
In the cockpit, Lepore, a seasoned pilot, was looking for a slash in the jungle where he could try to ditch. “In aeroplane crashes, I’ve heard people say too many times, if only they’d put it down somewhere 10 minutes earlier,” he told me later. At that point they figured we had at most 15 more minutes before the wing gave out.
I thought of Nancy, my wife of 22 years; my daughters, Caroline, 28, and Lisa, 34, my son, Christopher, 25, my parents, my friends. We have two parrots, Petey and Rosie, that we adore, and I thought of them. I tugged a page from a notebook and scrawled three sentences to my wife: “I love you honey. Please always know this. You made my life golden and my death acceptable to me.”
I folded the page, fumbled for my wallet, and tucked the note in. I jammed the wallet into my front-right trousers pocket, figuring it wouldn’t be as likely to pop out on impact, figuring leather is less likely to be consumed by fire. Then I thought: “How much is this going to hurt?” Later that struck me as an imbecilic way to have wasted what I had every reason to believe was one of my last few minutes of life. Then I heard a shout from the cockpit. “I see an airport,” Mr Lepore said. His knuckles were locked on the dashboard. Below, as we began a wide bank to descend and at the same time lessen stress on the damaged wing, I spotted the brown gash in the jungle, a runway bulldozed through the trees.
There is a joke about flying modern planes, with their automatic controls: a modern aeroplane requires a crew of three: a monkey, a licensed pilot and a big dog. The monkey’s job is to fly the plane, and the pilot’s job is to keep the monkey company. The dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he touches any of the controls. That’s not the way it was here, with most of the automatic systems blown away. Those two pilots physically wrestled the plane down with all four legs straining at the brakes. They put it down hard and hot, and managed to keep it on the runway.
We came to a screeching stop, tyres smoking. Like a plane-load of tourists, we cheered lustily to have landed. Then, still a little worried about an explosion, we stumbled off the plane. On the runway we were surrounded by Brazilian troops. The sun was behind the trees, but there was still enough light to see the damage to the wing, and to the tail, chunks of which had been ripped off. How could we have walked away from this?
