Reba: My Story (37 page)

Second, until the pilot came under the supervision of the tower, he would be forbidden to fly into San Diego’s Terminal Control Area (called a TCA). TCAs, in theory at least, make flying safer by separating faster aircraft like his jet from smaller, slower ones. So, apparently trying to avoid entering this TCA before he received his clearance from the tower, the pilot radioed the flight service specialist twice more. According to the transcript of the third conversation, the specialist confirmed that the pilot’s proposed plan would put the plane into the TCA without clearance.

The pilot then said, “So, I would be better off if I
headed right northeast and stayed down, say, down below three thousand [feet]?”

“Uh huh,” said the specialist.

“Do you agree?” the pilot asked him.

“Yeah, sure, that’ll be fine.”

Later, Jim Miller, supervisor of the FAA’s Effectiveness System, suggested that when the pilot mentioned 3,000, he might have meant 3,000 feet above sea level. The specialist apparently thought the pilot meant 3,000 feet altitude—that is, 3,000 feet above ground level—which would have put him several hundred feet higher.

That miscommunication would be deadly.

There was another cruel irony in the situation. The plane had left more than an hour and a half after its original departure time. Long before takeoff the pilot had filed a flight plan based on a departure time of midnight, which he could have updated at any point. He must not have, for at 1:30
A.M.
his plan was automatically canceled by the tower’s computer. So, about a minute after taking off on VFR, when the pilot radioed to be hooked into the tower, he was told that his clearance had “clocked out” and that it would be “put … right back in.” But when the controller called back to ask for his position, all he got was silence.

Another problem may have been the nature of the airspace around San Diego. On July 8, 1991, the
San Diego Union and Tribune
carried an article headlined “Local air map can baffle private pilots. Prohibited space rules called most complex in nation.” The story, which was a follow-up on the crash, began by stating that “airspace restrictions over San Diego County are needlessly complex, some pilots complain.”

The paper quoted Steve Elleson, a veteran flight instructor and former assistant dean of National University’s School of Aerospace Studies, who said that San Diego’s TCA, one of twenty-nine nationwide, is especially difficult. “It’s probably the most complex TCA in the country.
There are all these little extensions and legs and strange little corridors that go through it.”

Dick Russel, an aviation consultant and retired airline pilot with thirty years’ worth of experience, confirmed what Elleson had said about the complexity of the San Diego TCA. “It’s ridiculous,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “It makes no sense.”

The newspaper also reported that the NTSB had yet to complete its investigation but would likely blame the crash at least partly on pilot error. It cited Donald Norman, chairman of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Cognitive Science, who had studied pilots and cockpit interaction for three years and found that while TCAs were put in for safety reasons, coping with them is the hardest part of a pilot’s job. According to the paper, Norman said, “Read the TCA map, go spend a couple of hours trying to learn it and you won’t be able to in a couple of hours. And then when someone violates it, you call it pilot error. Come on.”

A
T 2:40
A.M.
, A GOVERNMENT HELICOPTER PILOT SPOTTED THE
flames of the fallen plane in the darkness. He radioed the fire’s exact location to officials waiting on the ground. Fifty-four rescue workers would eventually turn out to comb the mountaintop, including members of the San Diego Mountain Rescue Team, members of the Chula Vista Mounted Police, sheriff’s deputies, and county medical personnel.

One of them was Kathleen Tucker. She was told that there were no survivors of the crash, and as she recalls, “There were three or four of us who were selected to go to the mountain and recover the remains, and any personal items we could find—anything that we felt was significant to try to return to the families.”

Daylight hadn’t broken when they began to ascend the mountain. “It actually took a moment to realize what I was looking for,” she says. “I had been to other emergencies
but never to a plane crash—what I saw was debris everywhere. Paper, pieces of metal, small airplane parts … Most of the plane was in pieces the size of a half-dollar.”

It would take days for the workers to sift through it all and to bag and tag the personal effects for the families, who had provided lists of what they thought their loved ones had carried. “We sent back leather jackets, drum cymbals, books, jewelry, and broken pieces of guitars, that I remember,” Kathleen says.

In Spring 1993, two years and three months after the air crash, Kathleen returned to Otay Mountain with Tom Carter. The mountainside was totally quiet. A significant rainfall had broken a long Southern California drought, and it washed up debris that was driven into the ground on the night of the crash. Kathleen and Tom found a crumpled piece of the plane’s fuselage about the size of a large orange at the site. Someone had built a fence to keep the area secure from trespassers, and Kathleen and Tom found the trees that she and someone else had planted there shortly after the crash. Not far away, two tiny homemade crosses stand firm.

Anyone seeing those crosses for the first time would wonder why they were built more than 3,000 feet in the sky on an isolated mountaintop. Brown and green have returned to the grass, bushes, and weeds that were scorched in the crash. The growth is stirred only by the wind. There are no telltale signs that anything tragic had ever happened there.

But those of us—family members, colleagues, friends—who lost people in the crash will be marked by it forever.

B
ACK AT THE HOTEL, WE WERE PACKING TO LEAVE
San Diego. There was nothing left for us to do there, and a tremendous amount of work lay ahead of us in Nashville. By noon, the hotel lobby was swarming with reporters and cameramen, so security personnel escorted us out of the building through a back way exit, and we were able to evade the press.

For most of the night, people from my organization who had flown on the second plane—band members Joe McGlohon and Pete Finney and crew members Gayle Hase, Ricky Moeller, Galen Henson, Brian Leedham, and Robert Kosloskie—were unaware of their colleagues’ fate. Narvel had telephoned instructions to their pilot to fly straight to Nashville, rather than to Fort Wayne. When the plane stopped for refueling in Memphis, Brian Leedham looked out his window and recognized the Federal Express corporate
headquarters. The passengers instantly knew where they were and wondered why.

Copilot Wayne Woolsey, Roger’s brother, turned to the group and made the announcement. “Guys,” he said, “the other plane went down. I don’t know if there were any survivors.”

Joe McGlohon thought that Wayne was trying to be funny, and got on him for kidding about something so serious.

“No,” said Wayne, “I’m serious. The other plane went down.”

Joe, Brian, and the others hurried off the plane. They walked with Wayne into an airport waiting room where he used the telephone. Minutes later he confirmed that their friends and colleagues were dead. It was approximately 10
A.M.
in Tennessee.

Gayle Hase at first refused to get back on the plane for the forty-minute flight to Nashville. He said he was going to lease a car, and Joe briefly thought about riding with him.

“I can’t ride in a car for two and a half hours,” Joe said. “I need to get home now,” adding that he needed to be with his wife and children.

“Look,” Joe told Gayle, “you can do what you want. But we got to go. We got to get home as soon as we can.”

The group, including Gayle, reluctantly climbed back on the aircraft. Boarding must have been especially difficult for Brian. The crash marked the third time he had been in the “other” plane.

In all the confusion of those hours, we forgot to call and inform our bus driver, Larry Jones, who was waiting for his passengers in Fort Wayne. He had planned to do what he had done hundreds of times—pick them up at the airport, drive them to their hotel, and later to our show.

There is an intense bonding between band members and their bus driver. He’s not only the guy who takes the band on long overnight hauls between shows when most members get their sleep, but the driver is also the guy who
at three o’clock in the morning will have a musician approach him and sit on the steps beside him and pour his heart out. Being a bus driver is kind of like being a lay psychiatrist to the band. Those players trusted Larry as much as he loved them.

So he was shocked when another bus driver said to him, “Man, that’s terrible about the band, isn’t it?”

“What about the band?” Larry asked.

“Well, their plane crashed.”

“What do you mean their plane crashed?” Larry pressed. “Is everybody okay?”

“No,” the driver said. “I think everybody is dead.”

“I totally freaked out,” Larry recalled. “In those two airplanes were the most important people in the world to me, except for my mother and brother.”

Not wanting to believe it, he went back to the motel, turned on CNN, and fought back the tears. Seconds later, he walked across the hall and knocked on the door of Larry Wallace, Paula Kaye’s husband.

“What has happened?” Larry said.

“Every one of them is dead,” Wallace said, and said nothing else.

Acting on reflex, Larry went to work. He walked to the front desk to turn in the keys for rooms that wouldn’t be used. “That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, tell them people we didn’t need their keys,” he remembers. “I had to look at everybody’s names on those envelopes. Nobody at the motel seemed to care. I got mad. It was like, ‘You don’t need them, so what?’ ”

I’m glad that no one at the motel, who might not have known about the fatalities, confronted Larry about turning in so many keys. “You know how everybody wants to pass pain along,” Larry says. “I was definitely wanting to pass some pain along.”

N
ARVEL AND I WERE RUNNING ON ADRENALINE WHEN OUR
plane touched down in Gallatin. We drove straight home. Cindy, our nanny, and Shelby were waiting on the front porch. I got out of the car and immediately took Shelby into my arms. He had just turned one. Holding his warm little body was such an affirmation of life, a comfort I really needed right then.

Cindy took Shelby back so that Narvel and I could go see the families, starting with Jim’s wife, Debbie Hammon. Her place was filled with family and friends. As we sat thrashing out the situation, over and over, she told us a couple of stories. The first was about Jim, who on the day he was to leave for Saginaw, could not seem to get packed. This was so unlike Jim, who was accustomed to organizing a band and crew and moving them 1,000 miles a day. Debbie said that as he tried to pack he kept saying, “Man, I just wish I didn’t have to go.”

“He never said that before,” Debbie told me. “He was always so ready to get on the road with everybody.”

Then she told me a story about Jason, her older son. He had been at home in Nashville by himself. Debbie was in Gatlinburg with her youngest son Jeremiah, when Narvel had called, and Jason had given him her number.

Debbie told us that on Saturday morning right before Narvel phoned, Jason had been asleep and woke up because he thought he heard somebody walking through the house. He got out of bed and looked around. He found nothing and went back to bed. Shortly after, the telephone rang with Narvel’s call.

I still wonder about that. Could it have been Jim, his spirit, coming back to look in on his family one last time?

From Debbie’s we went to see Dana McVickers, Michael Thomas’s wife. Before he’d left on that last trip, they’d played and wrestled on the couch, laughing together. When Michael called her that night after the band got to Saginaw he said he’d been late getting to the bus. Dana said
she was terribly sorry she’d made him late, but Michael told her he wouldn’t have missed that for the world.