Increasingly pitted and rutted, wandering among the trees as though weary and losing its way, the lane finally pulled a blanket of weeds across itself and curled up to rest under a canopy of evergreen boughs.
Parking and switching off the engine, Barbara said, “We’ll walk from here. It’s no more than half a mile, and the brush isn’t especially thick.”
Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services. Broken only by the snapping of twigs and the soft crunch of dry pine needles underfoot, this prayerful silence was, for Joe, as oppressive as the imagined roar of jet engines that sometimes shook him into an anxiety attack. It was a stillness full of eerie, disturbing expectation.
He trailed Barbara between columns of tall trees, under green vaults. Even in the late morning, the shadows were as deep as those in a monastery cloister.
The air was crisp with the aroma of pine. Musty with the scent of toadstools and natural mulch.
Step by step, a chill as damp as ice melt seeped from his bones and through his flesh, then out of his brow, his scalp, the nape of his neck, the curve of his spine. The day was warm, but he was not.
Eventually he could see an end to the ranks of trees, an open space past the last of the white pines. Though the forest had begun to seem claustrophobic, he was now reluctant to forsake the crowding greenery for the revelation that lay beyond.
Shivering, he followed Barbara through the last trees into the bottom of a gently rising meadow. The clearing was three hundred yards wide from north to south — and twice that long from the east, where they had entered it, to the wooded crest at the west end.
The wreckage was gone, but the meadow felt haunted.
The previous winter’s melting snow and the heavy spring rains had spread a healing poultice of grass across the torn, burnt land. The grass and a scattering of yellow wildflowers, however, could not conceal the most terrible wound in the earth: a ragged-edged, ovate depression approximately ninety yards by sixty yards. This enormous crater lay uphill from them, in the northwest quadrant of the meadow.
“Impact point,” Barbara Christman said.
They set out side by side, walking toward the precise place where three-quarters of a million pounds had come screaming out of the night sky into the earth, but Joe quickly fell behind Barbara and then came to a stop altogether. His soul was as gouged as this field, plowed by pain.
Barbara returned to Joe and, without a word, slipped her hand into his. He held tightly to her, and they set out again.
As they approached the impact point, he saw the fire-blackened trees along the north perimeter of the forest, which had served as backdrop to the crash-scene photograph in the Post. Some pines had been stripped bare of needles by the flames; their branches were charred stubs. A score of seared aspens, as brittle as charcoal, imprinted a stark geometry on the dismal sky.
They stopped at the eroded rim of the crater; the uneven floor below them was as deep as a two-story house in some places. Although patches of grass bristled from the sloping walls, it did not thrive on the bottom of the depression, where shattered slabs of gray stone showed through a thin skim of dirt and brown leaves deposited by the wind.
Barbara said, “It hit with enough force to blast away thousands of years of accumulated soil and still fracture the bedrock beneath.”
Even more shaken by the power of the crash than he had expected to be, Joe turned his attention to the somber sky and struggled to breathe.
An eagle appeared out of the mountain mists to the west, flying eastward on a course as unwaveringly straight as a latitude line on a map. Silhouetted against the gray-white overcast, it was almost as dark as Poe’s raven, but as it passed under that portion of sky that was blue-black with a still-brewing storm, it appeared to grow as pale as a spirit.
Joe turned to watch the bird as it passed overhead and away.
“Flight 353,” Barbara said, “was tight on course and free of problems when it passed the Goodland navigational beacon, which is approximately a hundred and seventy air miles east of Colorado Springs. By the time it ended here, it was twenty-eight miles off course.”
Encouraging Joe to stay with her on a slow walk around the crater rim, Barbara Christman summarized the known details of the doomed 747 from its takeoff until its premature descent.
Out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, Flight 353, bound for Los Angeles, ordinarily would have followed a more southerly corridor than the one it traveled that August evening. Due to thunderstorms throughout the South and tornado warnings in the southern Midwest, another route was considered. More important, the headwinds on the northerly corridor were considerably less severe than those on the southern; by taking the path of least resistance, flight time and fuel consumption could be substantially reduced. Consequently, the Nationwide flight-route planning manager assigned the aircraft to Jet Route 146.
Departing JFK only four minutes behind schedule, the nonstop to LAX sailed high over northern Pennsylvania, Cleveland, the southern curve of Lake Erie, and southern Michigan. Routed south of Chicago, it crossed the Mississippi River from Illinois to Iowa at the city of Davenport. In Nebraska, passing the Lincoln navigational beacon, Flight 353 adjusted course southwest toward the next major forward beacon, at Goodland in the northwest corner of Kansas.
The battered flight-data recorder, salvaged from the wreckage, eventually revealed that the pilot made the proper course correction from Goodland toward the next major forward beacon, at Blue Mesa, Colorado. But about a hundred and ten miles past Goodland, something went wrong. Although it experienced no loss of altitude or airspeed, the 747 began to veer off its assigned flight path, now traveling west-southwest at a seven-degree deviation from Jet Route 146.
For two minutes, nothing more happened — and then the aircraft made a sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, as if the pilot had begun to recognize that he was off course. But just three seconds later, this was followed by an equally sudden four-degree heading change, nose left.
Analysis of all thirty parameters covered by this particular flight-data recorder seemed to confirm that the heading changes were either yawing of the craft or resulted in yawing. First the tail section had swung to the left — or port — while the nose had gone right — starboard — and then the tail had swung to the right and the nose to the left, skidding in midair almost as a car might fishtail on an icy highway.
Post-crash data analysis also gave rise to the suspicion that the pilot might have used the rudder to execute these abrupt changes of heading — which made no sense. Virtually all yaws result from movements of the rudder, the vertical panel in the tail, but pilots of commercial jets eschew use of the rudder out of consideration for their passengers. A severe yaw creates lateral acceleration, which can throw standing passengers to the floor, spill food and drinks, and induce a general state of alarm.
Captain Delroy Blane and his copilot, Victor Santorelli, were veterans with forty-two years of commercial piloting between them. For all heading changes, they would have used the ailerons — hinged panels on the trailing edge of each wing — which facilitate gentle banking turns. They would have resorted to the rudder only in the event of engine failure on takeoff or when landing in a strong crosswind.