"Like a Wall of Napalm"

By Ed Magnuson

As Delta Air Lines Flight 191, a wide-bodied Lockheed L-1011 with 160 aboard, approached Dallas/Fort Worth Airport last Friday, the north Texas sky abruptly turned dark gray. Clouds welled up and burst into showers, and lightning bolts zigzagged menacingly. A meteorologist later estimated that a downdraft was rushing through the thunderstorm cell at 80 m.p.h. The huge plane descended, but suddenly plunged belly first to the ground a mile north of Runway 17 at the nation's largest airport (roughly the size of Manhattan). The L-1011 bounced off the turf and came down again a quarter-mile away, grazing one car on busy State Highway 114 and demolishing a second car, whose driver was decapitated. The plane skipped across a grassy field, ricocheted off a water tower, then burst into flames as it slid across the tarmac. "It was like a wall of napalm," said Airline Mechanic Jerry Maximoff. The tail section, with one of the plane's three engines and the last ten rows of seats, was the only recognizable part of the wreckage.

Somehow 31 people, including three flight attendants, initially survived the impact and subsequent inferno. "It was all sunshine until we actually started coming down," said Jay Slusher, 33, a computer programmer who was going to catch another plane for his home in Phoenix. "Then the rain started, very heavy. It became so dark you couldn't even see out the windows. The ride got rougher and rougher. It seemed like there was something on top of the plane, pushing it to the ground. The pilot tried to pull out of it. The speed of the engines increased. We started rocking back and forth. Then we were tossed all around. I saw an orange streak coming toward me on the left side of the floor. I thought we were going to explode. At that point, I said, 'Well, it's all over.' The next thing that happened is that I ended up sitting in my seat on my side. I looked up and I could see the grass. I said, 'Thank you, Lord,' unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out."

Gilbert Green, 21, a football player at Florida State University, was sitting on the right side of the plane as the fire broke out. "It started to singe my arm," he recalled. "Right then the plane broke in half and I was shot out of the way of the fire. [The fuselage] broke off right in front of me. All the seats in front of me went the other way." Most of the survivors were in the smoking section. Said one: "That's the first time a cigarette ever saved my life." Even two dogs in the rear cargo section were saved.

Rescue workers toiled at first in a nearly horizontal driving rain. They placed yellow sheets over the dead, quickly assessed the severity of survivors' injuries and warned area hospitals by radio about what type of cases to expect. The Rev. Richard Brown, who was giving last rites to the victims, was startled when he saw the stomach of one, a baby, "going up and down." He baptized the infant instead and alerted medics, but the child later died. Most of the injured were taken by helicopter or ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where doctors had tried to save John F. Kennedy in 1963. Officials were heartened by the local response to appeals for blood donations. Some 1,500 people lined up to give.

As night fell, a large crane lifted pieces of wreckage in the search for bodies. Four were found under the landing gear. Floodlights illuminated the scene, which included the grotesque sight of corpses being loaded into refrigerator trucks labeled LIVE MAINE LOBSTERS. All three members of the cockpit crew were killed. The pilot, Captain Ted Connors, 57, had flown for Delta for 31 years. One passenger survived because she made a lucky decision. Assigned a front seat before takeoff from Fort Lauderdale, Annie Edwards, of Pompano Beach, Fla., shifted to a rear seat beside a friend, Juanita Williams. Both survived. They were among a group of women going to Dallas to attend a convention of Delta Sigma Theta, a sorority. Other passengers were heading for Los Angeles, the flight's last stop. Friends checking the arrivals list there found a curt message: "Flight 191. See agent."

Overall, the L-1011's safety record has been good, although there have been two previous serious accidents. A fire spread disastrously after a Saudi Arabian L-1011 made an emergency landing at Riyadh in 1980, and 301 people died. In 1972, one of the planes operated by Eastern Airlines crashed into the Florida Everglades while approaching Miami; 98 people were killed.

The weather is expected to be the main focus of National Transportation Safety Board investigators, who rushed to Dallas to seek the cause of the accident. While some witnesses reported that lightning had struck Flight 191, a board spokesman doubted that this would have caused the crash. "Lightning doesn't normally take an airplane down," he said. "It hasn't happened in many, many years."

The more likely suspect is wind shear, a collision or crossing of high-velocity winds, often during thunderstorms. Since the winds can shift from head to tail almost instantaneously, the condition is nearly impossible for a pilot to handle at relatively slow takeoff and landing speeds. Recent studies have cited wind shear as a factor in at least 27 commercial aircraft accidents since 1964. The most notable: an Eastern Airlines 727 crash on landing at New York's JFK Airport in 1975 that killed 113, and a Pan American 727 accident after takeoff from New Orleans in 1982 that left 153 dead. President Reagan was in Air Force One in August 1983 when it landed at Maryland's Andrews Air Force Base moments before wind shear flattened trees at the airfield.

Dallas/Fort Worth is one of about 100 U.S. airports with a special array of anemometers to detect dangerous swirling winds near ground level. Investigators will be trying to determine what the sensors recorded just before Flight 191 made its approach, and if the readings were ominous, why the pilot was not warned. --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Jerome Chandler and David S. Jackson/Dallas

With reporting by Reported by Jerome Chandler, David S. Jackson/Dallas