Brett was a child of suburbia. He and his two brothers grew up in West Chicago. His father was an executive with a food service company, his mom was a teacher. They lived in a spacious colonial house across the street from a picturesque forest preserve that had ponds and hiking trails. It was like an extension of the Van Bortels’ front yard—a huge place where Brett and his brothers could build forts and go camping. In the winter they went cross-country skiing through the tranquil forest; on the Fourth of July, they climbed to the top of an old landfill called Mount Trashmore and watched the fireworks.
Brett was on the track and swimming teams and played middle linebacker and center on the freshman football squad. He broke his neck in a bad car accident when he was sixteen, but recovered completely. He had always been the writer in the family, even as a boy. On his eighteenth birthday, an age when many boys are in full rebellion against their parents, he wrote his mother a sentimental poem about how much he loved her. He chose the University of Iowa because it had a great English department. His favorite writers were classic authors—Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, and Shakespeare. But he also liked First Blood, the book that was the basis for the Rambo movies.
Joan had grown up on a farm in Melrose, Iowa, a tiny town about sixty miles south of Des Moines. Melrose was known as “Iowa’s Little Ireland” because most of its residents, including Joan’s family, were Irish. Her parents grew corn and soybeans and raised cows. As the only girl in a family of five boys, Joan was spared most of the farm duties. That was just as well because she gradually discovered that she preferred living in the city. In choosing to go to the University of Iowa, Joan effectively said good-bye to farm life. (They say in Iowa that you go to the University of Iowa for culture and to Iowa State for agriculture. Joan had chosen culture.)
Joan and Brett were acquaintances for several years in college but did not start dating until their senior year. After they graduated, they spent a winter skiing in Vail, Colorado, and then moved to Chicago to start their careers. They had bought a ranch-style house on Riedy Road just before they were married. It was a fixer-upper with purple and green walls that desperately needed to be repainted. But they found it a lot more inviting than the sterile shoebox homes in nearby Naperville, the ones on streets with names like Whispering Woods, even though there wasn’t a single native tree for miles. The Lisle house would take some work, but they could give it personality. They were not do-it-yourselfers, but figured they could learn. Their first project was the bathroom. They gave it a new coat of paint and wallpaper, and Brett replaced the toilet himself.
His latest project was installing floor tile in the kitchen. He had just placed the last tile when the phone rang. It was Joan’s secretary.
“There’s been a plane crash,” she said. “I think Joan was on it.”
Brett flipped on CNN. The first words out of the television were
“…no survivors.”
“Oh, my goodness,” said CNN anchor Linden Soles. “Well, we had initial reports of 123 people aboard, possibly 130 if that’s counting a crew of 7. Are there a large number of emergency crews in the area right now, Sandra?”
“The whole county has responded—helicopters, ambulances, medi-rescue, police from all over the county,” the woman replied.
“Now, your estimation that there are perhaps no survivors from this crash—is that based on what you’ve seen or have you heard any confirmation from any emergency personnel?”
“We have not really had any confirmation on it, but our understanding is that there are no survivors, but we are not confirmed on that.”
Brett quickly dialed the number that CNN listed for USAir, but he kept getting busy signals. When he finally got through, the USAir employees were clueless. Brett said he thought his wife was on the plane that crashed. A USAir agent promised to have someone call back.
Brett’s brother Grant had come over to help tile the floor. He could see that Brett was upset. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I think Joan might have been in a plane crash,” Brett said. His words came out matter-of-factly; it was foolish to jump to conclusions, right? He didn’t know that she was on that particular plane. There were lots of flights from Chicago to Pittsburgh. What were the odds that she was on the plane that had crashed?
Joan’s secretary said she would go to the office and check Joan’s itinerary. In the meantime, Brett called Joan’s credit card company, hoping that she had charged the tickets and they would have the flight number. The company was no help. Then he tried calling Bob Henninger, the coworker Joan was supposed to meet in Pittsburgh. He left Henninger a message and then repeatedly called the hotel where Joan was supposed to stay. But the hotel operator kept telling him she had not checked in yet. Brett called again and again. Finally the operator connected him to a room. The phone rang.
Thank God! thought Brett. She’s alive!
The operator came back on the line: “I’m sorry. She hasn’t checked in.”
Minutes after the accident, a USAir supervisor typed a few commands into a computer to prevent anyone at the airline from seeing information about Flight 427. Reservation agents who tried to call up the passenger list got a curt response on their screen: UNABLE TO DISPLAY.
Copies of the passenger list were printed for only three locations—USAir’s situation room in Pittsburgh, its consumer affairs office in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the eighth-floor conference room at the airline’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia—the place that would come to be known as the Next-of-Kin Room.
Within an hour after the crash, about twenty-five grim-faced managers and vice presidents began to assemble in the big room. A technician hooked up telephones around the table and plugged in a computer that would be used to compile a master list. Flip charts were tacked to the walls so everyone could see important phone numbers and the names of the passengers. A TV in the corner was tuned to CNN.
ANCHOR LINDEN SOLES: I’m going to bring back Leo Janssens, who is the president of the Aviation Safety Institute. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a non-profit consumer watchdog group. Mr. Janssens, with the crashes and the run of bad luck that you were mentioning that USAir has encountered over the past five years—this is their fifth fatal crash—in three of those crashes, the aircraft were Boeing 737s. Is there any safety suspicion that we should be reading into that number?
JANSSENS: I really don’t believe so, because the Boeing 737 has been in service, airline service I’m talking about, for approximately 30 years. I don’t know the exact number of flight hours, but it’s got an excellent safety record. Sure there have been crashes, but I ride [the plane] all the time myself. It’s just really too early to tell what has happened and therefore I caution people not to be overly concerned at this point about the Boeing 737. USAir normally runs a very good airline. Of course, their safety record over the past five years has been less than admirable in terms of the rest of the industry.
Everything in the Next-of-Kin Room was battleship gray—the walls, the table, even the chairs. The color fit the mood. The USAir employees in the room had all volunteered for this duty, but it was the worst assignment they would ever get. They had to review the reservation lists and tickets for Flight 427, determine who had actually gotten on the plane, and then deliver the horrible news to the passengers’ families.