A half-dozen blue-and-white police cruisers disgorged officers who opened the cars’ trunks, pulled out silver fire suits and climbed into them. Airport police were cross-trained in fire fighting, Vernon explained. On the station wagon’s DPS radio a stream of orders could be heard.
The fire trucks, supervised by a lieutenant in a yellow sedan, were taking positions on ramps at intervals down the runway’s length. Ambulances summoned from nearby communities were streaming into the airport and assembling nearby, but clear of the runway area.
Partridge had been the first to jump from the station wagon and, standing beside it, was scribbling notes. Broderick, less hurriedly, was doing the same. Minh Van Canh had clambered to the station wagon’s roof and now, standing, his camera ready, was scanning the sky to the north. Behind him was Ken O’Hara, trailing wires and a sound recorder.
Almost at once the stricken inbound flight was visible, about five miles out, with heavy black smoke behind it. Minh raised his camera, holding it steady, one eye tight against the viewfinder.
He was a sturdy, stocky figure, not much more than five feet tall, but with broad shoulders and long, muscular arms. His squarish dark face, pockmarked from a childhood bout with smallpox, held wide brown eyes which looked out impassively, unrevealing of what thoughts might lie behind them. Those who were close to Minh said it took a long time to get to know him.
About some things, though, there was consensus—namely, that Minh was industrious, reliable, honest, and one of the best TV cameramen in the business. His pictures were more than good; they were invariably attention-getting and oftentimes artistic. He had worked for CBA first in Vietnam, as a local recruit who learned his trade from an American cameraman for whom Minh carried equipment amid the jungle fighting. When his mentor was killed after stepping on a land mine, Minh, unaided, carried his body back for burial, then returned with the camera into the jungle where he continued filming. No one at CBA could ever remember hiring him. His employment simply became a fait accompli.
In 1975, with the fall of Saigon imminent, Minh, his wife and two children were among the all-too-few lucky ones airlifted from the U.S. Embassy courtyard by CH-53 military helicopter to the safety of the American Seventh Fleet at sea. Even then Minh filmed it all, and much of his footage was used on the National Evening News.
Now he was filming another aerial story, different but dramatic, whose ending had yet to be determined.
In the viewfinder the shape of the approaching Airbus was becoming clearer. Also clearer was a halo of bright flame on the right side with smoke continuing to stream behind. It was possible to see the fire coming from where an engine had been, and where now only a part of the engine pylon remained. To Minh and others watching, it seemed amazing that the entire airplane had not yet been engulfed.
Inside the station wagon, Vernon had switched on an aviation band radio. Air Traffic Control could be heard speaking with the Airbus pilots. The calm voice of a controller, monitoring their approach by radar, cautioned, “You are slightly below glide path … drifting left of center line … Now on glide path, on center line …”
But the Airbus pilots were clearly having trouble holding altitude and an even course. The plane seemed to be crabbing in, the damaged right wing lower than the left. At moments the plane’s nose veered away; then, as if from urgent efforts in the cockpit, swung back toward the runway. There was an uneven up-and-down movement as at one moment too much height was lost, at the next retrieved, but barely. Those on the ground were asking themselves the tense, unspoken question: Having come this far, would the Airbus make it all the way in? The answer seemed in doubt.
On the radio, the voice of one of the pilots could be heard. “Tower, we have landing-gear problems … hydraulic failure.” A pause. “We are trying the gear down ‘free fall’ … now.”
A fire captain, also listening, had stopped beside them. Partridge asked him, “What does that mean?”
“On big passenger planes there’s an emergency system to get the landing wheels down if hydraulic power is out. The pilots release all hydraulic power so the gear, which is heavy, should fall under its own weight, then lock. But once it’s down they can’t get it up again, even if they want to.”
As the fireman spoke, the Airbus landing gear could be seen slowly coming down.
Moments later, once more the calm voice of an air traffic controller: “Muskegon, we see your gear down. Be advised that flames are close to the right front gear.”
It was obvious that if the right front tires were consumed by fire, as seemed probable, that side of the landing gear might collapse on impact, skewing the airplane to the right at high speed.
Minh, fondling a zoom lens, had his camera running. He too could see the flames which had now reached the tires. The Airbus was floating over the airport boundary … Then it was closer in, barely a quarter mile from the runway … It was going to make it to the ground, but the fire was greater, more intense, clearly being fed by fuel, and two of the four right-side tires were burning, the rubber melting … There was a flash as one of the tires exploded.
Now the burning Airbus was over the runway, its landing speed 150 mph. As the aircraft passed the waiting emergency vehicles, one by one they swung onto the runway, following at top speed, tires screaming. Two yellow foam trucks were the first to move, the other fire trucks close behind.
On the runway, as the airplane’s landing gear made contact with the ground, another right-side tire exploded, then another. Suddenly all right tires disintegrated … the wheels were down to their rims. Simultaneously there was a banshee screech of metal, a shower of sparks, and a cloud of dust and cement fragments rose into the air … Somehow, miraculously, the pilots managed to hold the Airbus on the runway … It seemed to continue a long way and for a long time … At last it stopped. As it did, the fire flared up.
Still moving fast, the fire trucks closed in, within seconds pumping foam. Gigantic whorls of it piled up with incredible speed, like a mountain of shave cream.
On the airplane, several passenger doors were opening, escape slides tumbling out. The forward door was open on the right side, but on that side fire was blocking the mid-fuselage exits. On the left side, away from the fire, another forward door and a mid-fuselage door were open. Some passengers were already coming down the slides.
But at the rear, where there were two escape doors on each side, none had so far opened.
Through the three open doors, smoke from inside the airplane was pouring out. Some passengers were already on the ground. The latest ones emerged coughing, many vomiting, all gasping for fresh air.
By now the exterior fire was dying down under a mass of foam on one side of the airplane.
Firemen from the RIV’s, wearing silver protective clothing and breathing apparatus, had swiftly moved in and rigged ladders to the unopened rear doors. As the doors were opened manually from outside, more smoke poured out. The firemen hurried inside, intent on extinguishing any interior fire. Other firemen, entering the wrecked Airbus through the forward doors, helped passengers to leave, some of them dazed and weak.
Noticeably, the outward flow of passengers slowed. Harry Partridge made a quick estimate that nearly two hundred people had emerged from the plane’s interior, though from the information he had gathered he knew that 297, including crew, were reportedly aboard. Firemen began to carry some who appeared badly burned—among them two women flight attendants. Smoke was still drifting from inside, though less of it than earlier.
Minh Van Canh continued to videotape the action around him, thinking only professionally, excluding other thoughts, though aware that he was the only cameraman on the scene and in his camera he had something special and unique. Probably not since the Hindenburg airship disaster had a major air crash been recorded visually in such detail, while it happened.
Ambulances had been summoned to the on-site command post. A dozen were already there, with more arriving. Paramedics worked on the injured, loading them onto
numbered backboards. Within minutes the crash victims would be on their way to area hospitals alerted to receive them. With the arrival of a helicopter bringing doctors and nurses, the command post near the Airbus was becoming an improvised field hospital with a functioning triage system.
The speed with which everything was happening spoke well, Partridge thought, of the airport’s emergency planning. He overheard the fire captain report that a hundred and ninety passengers, more or less, were out of the Airbus and alive. At the same time that left nearly a hundred unaccounted for.
A fireman, pulling off his respirator to wipe the sweat from his face, was heard to say, “Oh Christ! The back seats are chock full of dead. It must have been where the smoke was thickest.” It also explained why the four rear escape doors had not been opened from inside.
As always with an aircraft accident, the dead would be left where they were until a National Transportation Safety Board field officer, reportedly on the way, gave authority to move them after approving identification procedures.
The flight-deck crew emerged from the Airbus, pointedly declining help. The captain, a grizzled four-striper, looking around him at the injured and already knowing of the many dead, was openly crying. Guessing that despite the casualties the pilots would be acclaimed for bringing the airplane in, Minh held the captain’s grief-stricken face in closeup. It proved to be Minh’s final shot as a voice called, “Harry! Minh! Ken! Stop now. Hurry! Bring what you’ve got and come with me. We’re feeding to New York by satellite.”
The voice belonged to Rita Abrams, who had arrived on a Public Information shuttle bus. Some distance away, the promised mobile satellite van could be seen. The van’s satellite dish, which folded like a fan for travel, was being opened and aimed skyward.
Accepting the order, Minh lowered his camera. Two other TV crews had arrived on the same shuttle bus as Rita—one from KDLS, the CBA affiliate—along with print press reporters and photographers. They and others, Minh knew, would carry the story on. But only Minh had the real thing, the crash exclusive pictures, and he knew with inward pride that today and in days to come, his pictures would be seen around the world and would remain a piece of history.
They went with Vernon in the PIO station wagon to the satellite van. On the way Partridge began drafting the words he would shortly speak. Rita told him, “Make your script a minute forty-five. As soon as you’re ready, cut a sound track, do a closing standup. Meanwhile, I’ll feed quick and dirty to New York.”
As Partridge nodded acknowledgment, Rita glanced at her watch: 5:43 P.M., 6:43 in New York. For the first-feed National Evening News, there was barely fifteen minutes left of broadcast time.
Partridge was continuing to write, mouthing words silently, changing what he had already written. Minh handed two precious tape cassettes to Rita, then put a fresh cassette in the camera, ready for Partridge’s audio track and standup close.
Vernon dropped them immediately alongside the satellite van. Broderick, who had come too, was going on to the terminal to phone his own report to New York. His parting words were, “Thanks, guys. Remember, if you want the in-depth dope tomorrow, buy the Times.”
O’Hara, the high-technology buff, regarded the equipment-packed satellite van admiringly. “How I love these babies!”
The fifteen-foot-wide dish mounted on the van’s platform body was now fully open and elevated with a 20-kilowatt generator running. Inside, in a small control room with editing and transmitting equipment tightly packed in tiers, a technician from the two-man crew was aligning the van’s uplink transmitter with a Ku-band satellite 22,300 miles above them—Spacenet 2. Whatever they transmitted would go to transponder 21 on the satellite, then instantly by downlink to New York to be rerecorded.
Inside the van, working alongside the technician, Rita expertly ran Minh’s tape cassettes through an editing machine, viewing them on a TV monitor. Not surprisingly, she thought, the pictures were superb.
On normal assignments, and working with an editor as an extra team member, producer and editor together would select portions of the tapes, then, over a sound track of a correspondent’s comments, put all components together as a fully edited piece. But that took forty-five minutes, sometimes longer, and today there wasn’t time. So, making fast decisions, Rita chose several of the most dramatic scenes which the technician transmitted as they were—in TV jargon, “quick and dirty.”
Outside the satellite van, seated on some metal steps, Partridge completed his script and, after conferring briefly with Minh and the sound man, recorded a sound track.
Having allowed for the anchorman’s introduction, which would be written in New York and have the story’s up-front facts, Partridge began:
“Pilots in a long-ago war called it comin’ in on a wing and a prayer. There was a song with that name … It’s unlikely anyone will write a song about today.
“The Muskegon Airlines Airbus was sixty miles out from Dallas–Fort Worth … with a near-full passenger load … having come from Chicago … when the mid-air collision happened …”
As always, when an experienced correspondent wrote for TV news, Partridge had written “slightly off the pictures.” It was a specialized art form, difficult to learn, and some in television never quite succeeded. Even among professional writers the talent did not receive the recognition it deserved, because the words were written to accompany pictures and seldom read well alone.
The trick, as Harry Partridge and others like him knew, was not to describe the pictures. A television viewer would be seeing, visually, what was happening on the screen and did not need verbal description. Yet the spoken words must not be so far removed from the pictures as to split the viewer’s consciousness. It was a literary balancing act, much of it instinctive.
Something else TV news people recognized: The best news writing was not in neat sentences and paragraphs. Fragments of sentences worked better. Facts must be taut, verbs strong and active; a script should crackle. Finally, by manner and intonation the correspondent should convey a meaning too. Yes, he or she had to be an excellent reporter, but an actor also. At all those things Partridge was expert, though today he had a handicap: he had not seen the pictures, as a correspondent normally did. But he knew, more or less, what they would be.
Partridge concluded with a standup—himself, head and shoulders, speaking directly to the camera. Behind him, activity was continuing around the wrecked Airbus.
“There is more of this story to come … tragic details, the toll of dead and injured. But what is clear, even now, is that collision dangers are multiplying … on the airways, in our crowded skies … Harry Partridge, CBA News, Dallas–Fort Worth.”
The cassette with the narration and standup was passed to Rita inside the van. Still trusting Partridge, knowing him too well to waste precious time checking, she ordered it sent to New York without review. Moments later, watching and listening as the technician transmitted, she was admiring. Remembering the discussion half an hour earlier in the terminal bar she reflected: with his multitalents, Partridge was demonstrating why his pay was so much higher than that of the reporter for the New York Times.
Outside, Partridge was performing still one more of a correspondent’s duties—an audio report, spoken from notes and largely ad-libbed, for CBA Radio News. When the TV transmission was finished, that would go to New York by satellite too.
3
The CBA News headquarters building in New York was a plain and unimpressive eight-story brownstone on the east side of upper Manhattan. Formerly a furniture factory, now only the shell of the original structure remained, the interior having been remodeled and refurbished many times by an assortment of contractors. Out of this piecemeal work had come a maze of intersecting corridors in which unescorted visitors got lost.
Despite the drab domicile of CBA News, the place contained a sultan’s fortune in electronic wizardry, a considerable portion of it in technicians’ country, two floors below street level, sometimes referred to as th
e catacombs. And here, among a multitude of functions, was a vital department with a prosaic name—the One-inch-tape Room.
All news reports from CBA crews around the world came in, via satellite and occasionally by landline, to the One-inch-tape Room. From there, too, all taped recordings of finished news went out to viewers, via a broadcast control room and again by satellite.
Endemic to the One-inch-tape Room were enormous pressures, taut nerves, tension, instant decision making and urgent commands, especially just before and during broadcasts of the National Evening News.
At such times, someone unaware of what was happening might consider the scene disorganized bedlam, a technological nightmare. The impression would be heightened by surrounding semidarkness, necessary for watching a forest of TV screens.
But in fact the operation functioned smoothly, quickly and with skill. Mistakes here could be disastrous. They rarely happened.
A half-dozen large and sophisticated reel-to-reel tape machines, built into consoles and with TV monitors above, dominated the activity; the machines used one-inch magnetic tape, the highest-quality and most reliable. At each tape machine and console sat a skilled operator receiving, editing and transmitting tapes swiftly, according to instructions. The operators, older than most workers in the building, were a motley group who seemed to take pride in dressing shabbily and behaving boisterously. Because of this, a commentator once described them as the “fighter pilots” of TV broadcasting.
Every weekday, an hour or so before National Evening News broadcast time, a senior news producer moved down five floors from his seat at the Horseshoe to preside over the One-inch-tape Room and its operators. There, acting as a maestro, shouting instructions while semaphoring with his arms, he viewed incoming material for that night’s news, ordered further editing if necessary, and kept colleagues at the Horseshoe informed of which expected items were now in-house and how, at first glance, each looked.