Four years ago, a propeller broke off the left engine of a commuter plane that had just left Atlanta with 29 aboard. From that moment until the plane went down in a hayfield near Carrollton, those 29 people had nine minutes and 20 seconds to prepare for the impact that would either end their lives or change them forever. Staff writer Gary M. Pomerantz tells their stories in this six-part report.  (Note: Gary was recently hired by Penguin Books to write an entire book that details the story of the plane crash.  We'll update our partners with details when they become available.)

By Gary M. Pomerantz
Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

ASA Flight 529 was more than three miles high when a propeller blade broke off its left engine. The Atlantic Southeast Airlines twin-engine turboprop carrying 29 people shuddered and fell.

In window seat 2A, a young woman who had served in the Army thought she'd heard a small cannon explode. She looked out and saw the propeller declare war on the left wing. She slammed shut her window shade, frightened by the sight and what it meant.

Robin Fech

Flight attendant Robin Fech grabbed the metal kitchen galley to steady herself. Soda cans trembled. Under her breath, Fech cursed.

In the seventh row, a shipyard worker from Maine thought the plane had hit an air pocket.

An engineer with a New York accent thought they'd struck a bird.

So did the Baltimore schoolteacher in front of him, though she wondered, What type of bird flies this high? A peregrine falcon, perhaps.

A young deputy sheriff had lost track of time and altitude. He thought the plane had hit a tree or skimmed a mountainside. So severe was the shudder that his partner next to him, a law enforcement lifer, grabbed the young deputy's left knee to keep from falling on him.

Almost reflexively, the flight attendant told passengers, "This plane is designed to fly on one engine." But in a moment, seeing the damage, even she didn't believe that.

In the cockpit, the co-pilot thought the propeller separation sounded like someone had hit a trash can with a baseball bat.

As the plane dropped - dramatically at first, then more gradually - the veteran pilot beside him said, "What the hell's going on with this thing?"

In nine minutes and 20 seconds, the plane would crash. Just before 1 p.m. on Aug. 21, 1995, ASA Flight 529 would slam through a grove of pine trees and into a hayfield in Carroll County.

The plane would bounce twice, breaking apart as it went. The cabin would depressurize and fill with sunlight and humid air. A fuel-fed fire would break out at 1,800 degrees. Then, unspeakable horror.

Of the 29 people aboard, 19 lived to tell about it. In the telling, survivors almost without exception have asked themselves the same question about those nine minutes and 20 seconds: Was it really that long?

At home, that's long enough to walk around the block or load the dishwasher.

But how long is it when your plane is falling?

Long enough to fill the passenger cabin with the quiet of judgment day.

They sat three across in narrow seats with thin backs, each row containing a single seat to the left of the aisle and two to the right. They rode in a tube, claustrophobic to some, 10 rows in all.

From the cockpit door to row 10 in back was 31 feet.

That tight space contained 27 lives, full and varied: Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Jewish, atheist, white, black, Asian, never married, once divorced, twice divorced. The passengers of Flight 529 had 18 spouses, 41 children and more than two dozen grandchildren.

The plane was bound from Atlanta to Gulfport, Miss. Passengers' destinations included a grocery store in Mobile, Ala., a hospital in Jackson, Miss., a chemical plant in Muscle Shoals, Ala.

There were two deputy sheriffs from Virginia en route to retrieve a fugitive. A federal prosecutor investigating riverboat gambling in Gulfport. A New Orleans woman returning home after interviewing for a job as an ASA flight attendant. An 18-year-old airman heading for his first assignment in Biloxi. A young Mississippi minister coming back after giving a trial sermon that had wowed a Midwest congregation.

With them was a crew of three: a divorced 37-year-old flight attendant working long hours for $20,000 a year; a young, self-confident first officer from California who was five months into his childhood dream of being a commercial pilot; and the captain, a seven-year veteran at ASA who loved flying the high-performance Brazilian-made plane, once telling his wife, "I think I can get one down in a field somewhere if I have to."

A few passengers had expected to be on a jet, not a turboprop. Some had even thought they were flying Delta, only to be told ASA was "the Delta Connection."

Dawn Dumm

Mary Jean Adair

Stepping aboard en route to a family get-together in Mississippi, Baltimore teacher Dawn Dumm and her 64-year-old mother took two front-row seats. Neither liked the feel of the tiny Brasilia. Dumm thought the carpet and seat coverings looked worn, like those on a school bus.

Dumm had become more careful after a series of personal tragedies, including her father's cancer death and heart surgery for an infant child. The common theme, she decided, was that she had had no control over these things. A devout Catholic, she now collected decorative angels.

Dumm once heard a travel expert say that synthetic material burns into your skin in a fire whereas cotton burns away from it. On this trip, she wore clothes made of cotton, as did her mother, Mary Jean Adair. In an emergency, they would be ready.

To her family, Adair had a sixth sense, an uncanny ability to know when things weren't right. To Adair, this plane did not feel right.

"I don't like this at all," she told her daughter.

"Just think of it as an adventure" was the reply.

Moments later, still at the airport, an overhead light panel came loose in the fifth row. A mechanic came aboard to reattach the unit. Asked if he had fixed it, the mechanic told flight attendant Fech, "I think so."

Hearing this, Adair asked her daughter: "Don't you think we should get off?"

9:20 to impact

When the blade broke in the clouds 20 minutes after takeoff, ASA Flight 529 was climbing past 18,000 feet.

The Brasilia yawed and fell sharply to the left. A cup of apple juice spilled at the feet of Angela Brumfield, the aspiring flight attendant in the second row. Passengers napping in the second, fourth and sixth rows shot up in their seats. In the third and seventh rows, one man reading a golf magazine and another a novel about Vietnam instinctively turned left toward the noise.

The plane fell nearly 4,000 feet in the next minute.

The roar of the left engine - a noise reassuring in its steadiness - suddenly quieted. The right engine whined louder.

For 33 seconds, the aircraft shook, at times violently.

Passengers focused on what had happened to the left engine. Once sleek, it now seemed a junk pile. The metal covering of the engine had ripped apart and peeled back, exposing the machinery's guts. Wires flapped in the winds. Hydraulic fluid, oil and jet fuel poured into the airstream.

The propeller unit was not where it was supposed to be. Three of the four propeller blades had been blown out of position by several feet and now were lodged against the front edge of the wing. The fourth blade was missing.

To David Schneider, a young construction engineer in the eighth row, it looked like a bomb had exploded in the engine.

Ed Gray, a 100,000-mile-a-year frequent flier from Connecticut in the twilight of his business career, thought, After all these years of flying, now it happens!

Chuck Pfisterer, a purchasing manager for a paper company, was a nervous flier even before the propeller separated. Usually conversation with other passengers got him past his nerves. That and a Jack Daniel's on the rocks.

Dumbstruck, Pfisterer watched the fluids spray. This can't be! he told himself. Pfisterer feared an engine fire. He couldn't take his eyes off the left wing.

Fech slid open the window shade in the second row to look for herself. The sight of the mangled machinery was enough to make her shut the shade at once.

Passengers, turning from the engine, looked to the flight attendant for an explanation.

Looking back at the frightened eyes fixed on her, Fech felt as if she had 26 children on board.

A survivor by nature, Fech was an emotive woman from Athens, quick with self-deprecating humor. She hadn't made a career as a ballet instructor or in marriage ("Best party I ever went to; I just went home with the wrong person"). At 37, her passions were her job, which she performed with command, and ASA's frequent fliers, whom she embraced and greeted with a small-town familiarity: "Hi, Hon-eey!"

She had yet to have her toughness tested in crisis, though she understood long before this flight that passenger safety was her primary responsibility. That was spelled out on a nightshirt she had at home: "I'm Here to Save Your Ass, Not Kiss It!"

Fech had little room to work in: The aisle was just 20 inches wide and, at 5-foot-6, she bumped her head unless she walked precisely down the middle.

8:19 to impact

At 14,200 feet and falling, Fech improvised.

She lied.

The passengers' questions came: "What happened? Are we going to be OK?" Fech placed her hands reassuringly on their shoulders and said, "These planes are designed to fly on one engine."

This was true, Fech knew, when the inoperable engine was a shutdown, but not, as in this case, when it was deformed.

She told passengers, "It's one of the first things flight crews practice - going in with one engine." Again, she knew, this applied to shutdowns.

One by one, Fech snapped shut the window shades on the left side of the plane. "We don't need to be looking at that," she said. The plane stopped shaking. The smoothness helped Fech's credibility with passengers. So did the clouds, which kept them from recognizing the rate of their descent.

But violent tremors soon undid her work. "That's just what turbulence feels like with one engine," Fech lied.

When Fech reached the sixth row, the nervous flier there blurted: "Do you think we are going to make it?" Pfisterer's voice was tense and loud enough to be heard across the aisle. Fech assured him, "Of course we're going to make it." But the nervous flier kept talking, an edge to his voice. "How can that fly like that?"

Fearing his alarm could infect the other passengers, Fech stepped to the next row.

She heard the bells' ding-dong and saw a small red light flashing on the wall panel in back. The cockpit was calling.

Thank God that Ed Gannaway is flying this plane, she thought. They'd flown together often, and once had handled smoothly a medical emergency on a flight originating in Augusta. Gannaway was like a big brother to her, even advising her on her 401(k) plan. His voice soothed.

And soothing was just what Fech, the emissary from cockpit to cabin, needed most.

Ed Gannaway

Behind the cockpit door, all hell had broken loose.

As soon as the propeller broke, a chaotic clamor filled the cockpit. Chimes signaled a master warning: Ding, ding, ding. Then came a synthesized woman's voice meant to alarm, a voice known cynically to pilots as "The Bitch."

The Bitch called out: "Autopilot, engine control, oil."

For about 20 seconds, Gannaway and the co-pilot, Matt Warmerdam, were on the ragged edge of losing control of their plane.

"We got a left engine out," Gannaway said as the shuddering intensified.

The chaotic clamor: Ding, ding, ding . . . "Autopilot, engine control, oil."

"I need some help here," Gannaway said.

The plane pulled hard left, trying to turn itself, flip and spiral into the ground. The damaged propeller was creating excessive drag and a loss of wing lift. Had it simply fallen off, controlling the plane would have been easier.

"What the hell's going on with this thing?" Gannaway asked.

The two men took on the machine, white-knuckling their steering columns and staring wide-eyed into instrument panels for heading, altitude, air speed and the power setting on the good engine.

Together, they fought to regain control. They put on their headsets, and then Warmerdam's call went out. "Atlanta Center. AC 529, declaring an emergency. We've had an engine failure. We're out at fourteen two at this time," he said, referring to the altitude.

Atlanta Center responded, "AC 529, roger, left turn direct Atlanta." They would turn back to Atlanta.

Early that morning, Gannaway had left home in Dublin, Ga., for his base in Macon. A compulsive exerciser, he'd run his usual three miles first.

His wife, Jackie, had seen fear in him only once, after he'd made a scheduled run to Gulfport through thunderstorms that diverted his plane to three airports. With his fuel low, he later told his wife, he had prayed for a safe landing.

Now, manipulating the flight variables over the next 45 seconds, Gannaway said, "It's getting more controllable here . . . the engine . . . Let's watch our speed."

7:01 to impact

Matt Warmerdam

To Gannaway, Warmerdam said, "I'll tell Robin what's goin' on." He hit the call button.

If Fech had hoped for a soothing call, she didn't get it. Hoping to hear Gannaway, she got Warmerdam instead.

This troubled her because she knew Gannaway liked to be in contact with the cabin and to be in total control of his plane.

"OK, we had an engine failure, Robin," Warmerdam said. "We've declared an emergency. We're diverting back into Atlanta. Go ahead and, uh, brief the passengers. This will be an emergency landing back in."

Trained to ask questions in such moments - How much time do we have? Will there be a warning or bells? What is my signal for evacuation? - Fech didn't think to ask one. She said, "All right. Thank you."

At 10,000 feet, still in the clouds, Gannaway realized Atlanta was too far away. He told Warmerdam, "We need an airport quick."

Warmerdam at once radioed Atlanta Center: "We need an airport quick, and, uh, roll the trucks and everything for us."

The center replied that West Georgia Regional Airport near Carrollton was 10 miles away.

Gannaway told his first officer, "Engine failure checklist, please."

6:45 to impact

Fech took a deep breath, gathered herself, pushed the P.A. button, then turned to face 26 passengers. Repeating what she had been told, she announced the plane was headed back to Atlanta. She sounded firm even though she was as frightened as she had ever been in flight.

She announced, "The cockpit crew has confirmed we have an emergency. We have an engine failure."

The nervous flier in row six thought to himself, Yeah, you've got an engine problem, all right!

Fech reiterated that the plane could fly on one engine.

She told passengers they needed to prepare, just in case: Make certain your seat belt is low and tight, place your feet flat on the floor, review your emergency card.

Then she explained the brace position - crossed wrists against the seat back in front of you, foreheads pressed against the wrists - and told passengers she wanted individual demonstrations. "You'll have to prove this to me," she said. She asked if there were any questions.

No one had any. Fech hurriedly cleared off the galley.

On the left side of the plane, passengers inched up their window shades.

4:46 to impact

The Brasilia continued to fall, though at a slower rate, about 1,500 feet per minute.

At 7,000 feet, this gave some a false sense of security.

A few understood the principles of flight. But for most, flying was an act of faith in the people who build, inspect and fly planes. "You put your trust in them," Dumm, the teacher, would say.

Living in an age of flight, these passengers boarded planes without a second thought, never questioning how 24,000 pounds remained aloft. They accepted the seeming exactitude of flight, the overall safety and speed of it. What Lewis and Clark once took more than a year to cover could be covered now in less than four hours.

Anticipating a safe touchdown, Gray, the Connecticut businessman, imagined a foam landing strip and a bouncy ride in.

The young deputy in row nine thought back to childhood fears and the way things always turned out OK. This will be over, too, Tod Thompson reminded himself. Besides, he didn't want to be one of those people screaming up and down the aisle.

Two rows forward, David McCorkell, a computer trainer from Minnesota, believed things would turn out fine. He'd landed in a blizzard as fire trucks lined the runway. When that plane landed safely, every passenger clapped. Now, McCorkell was more worried about the loss of a half-day's billing. A couple of hundred dollars.

Guilty, that's how Fech felt as she walked the cabin.

Guilty that she had anything to do with this mess.

And scared.

For Fech, the hardest part was seeing passengers' shock and disbelief while trying to conceal her own.

At each seat, she corrected brace positions, gently pushing down heads and lifting elbows.

Fech asked the three passengers sitting by emergency exits if they would accept responsibility for opening the doors once the plane came to a stop.

A quivering right hand went up in row five, where the retired woman from Asheville, N.C., said softly, "No, no." Lucille Burton wanted to sit with her husband, Lonnie, who earlier had moved to the back for more leg room.

Fech called out for a volunteer to take Mrs. Burton's seat to keep the weight and balance in the plane roughly as it was.

From the back, a tall, well-groomed federal prosecutor - who loved nothing more than standing before juries - suddenly stood.

Bond Rhue

"I'll do it," Bond Rhue said.

He smiled and held up his emergency card. "Don't worry," he said. "I've read this."

Rhue, investigating riverboat gambling in Mississippi, wore a tie featuring little pigs. He thought it apt for a trip to the South, reasoning, "I am going to the country."

Rhue took 5C. The Burtons resettled in the back row.

Except for Fech, hardly anyone spoke. Most passengers were sitting next to strangers.

They didn't even make eye contact.

They stared at the left wing, then at Fech, then stared at the left wing some more.

In row six, Alan Barrington, a human resources manager from Roswell, looked at his emergency card, read about flotation devices and exit rows, and thought, If we crash, this card won't do me any good.

The right engine whined on. In the ninth row, Charles Barton asked his partner to open his window shade. Barton wanted to see the good engine. "No way," Thompson said. "If that propeller isn't turning, I don't want to know."

Hastily, Fech instructed passengers to remove pens and other sharp objects from their pockets. Take off your eyeglasses, too, she said, and put your drinks into the seat-back pockets.

In row six, Barrington listened closely. Did she say pour the drinks out? he wondered.

Immediately, Barrington prayed: "Heavenly Father, when this plane crashes and I die, I'm ready to go home. But please, Lord, let me ask for just a few favors." He first asked to die quickly. Then he asked that his wife have the strength to raise their four young children and that they always remember their father's love.

Then Barrington's thoughts turned more primitive: What does it feel like to have your head and limbs ripped off? The thought tingled his spine. Will I even feel it? Will I go to heaven immediately?

Two rows ahead, Gray wasn't thinking of God. For one thing, he didn't believe in God. He believed that life had its own set of natural circumstances and rhythms. An engineer by training, he had diagnosed the problem on the left wing in his own way: This was an abnormal part of life's natural circumstances and rhythms.

In row two, the young woman from New Orleans who was preparing to become an ASA flight attendant thought of death. Brumfield didn't want to panic, least of all in a plane. Tears came, so she stared at the ceiling, hoping to keep them from running down her face.

Thompson, the young deputy, looked at the right-side window in row nine. He wondered: If this glass breaks, am I going to be sucked outside?

2:44 to impact

With the plane at 4,000 feet, air traffic controllers in Atlanta told the pilot that West Georgia Regional Airport was eight miles away.

"We can get in on a visual," Gannaway replied from the clouds.

An unknown voice from another aircraft visited the drama: "Good luck, guys."

" 'Preciate it," Warmerdam replied.

2:09 to impact

For the first time, Gannaway peered over his left shoulder and saw the damage to the left engine.

"It's just hanging out there," he said.

In row two, John Tweedy, the engineer with a New York accent, thought of his wife and 3-year-old son. He decided life was good and that he wasn't ready to leave.

In row three, Barney Gaskill, a 57-year-old Ohioan, thought of his family, too. He imagined his wife, daughter and son, his grandkids and his mother. They lived in different states, and in a dire moment such as this, that bothered him. He felt the need to address them collectively.

In row seven, McCorkell no longer bemoaned the loss of a half-day's billing. Now he was angry with God.

He didn't believe he should die alone. At 37 and twice divorced - the last time just 13 months ago from a woman he still loved - he'd never had this thought before. He traveled so regularly that his two teenage sons didn't even know where he was at this moment. Now all he wanted was a hand to hold, or at least to see someone familiar in his last living moment.

Denied this, bitterness filled him.

Fech moved purposefully through the middle rows, correcting brace positions. In row eight, Schneider concentrated on his emergency-door responsibility.

"I know I'm supposed to pull this handle right here," he told Fech.

Schneider

Schneider's confidence gave Fech someone to count on. But then her own insecurity came into play: He knows I'm scared and he thinks I need to be reassured.

At 28, Schneider felt a young man's invincibility. He told himself, People know when they are going to die, and I am not going to die. A Catholic, he tended to necessities and prayed a form of the rosary: an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, ending with: " . . . as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen."

Up front, Dumm, the Baltimore teacher, asked her mother to take her seat belt on and off, on and off.

"If the door in front of us is blocked," she told her mother, "you'll have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl. Count the rows, because the fifth row is where we have to get out."

Dumm thought of her husband and their two sons. With her mother's attention diverted for a moment, Dumm quietly tore the cover from her paperback novel and, in a nervous scrawl, wrote a goodbye note:

"You are the Lights of My Life. Always, Mommy."

Then she wrote to her boys: "Lucas and Zeke: Be Good Always. Prayers."

Dumm folded the note and tucked it inside the fanny pack around her waist.

"What should we do now?" her mother asked.

"I think we should pray," Dumm replied.

They joined hands and said the Lord's Prayer: " . . . Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven . . . "

1:28 to impact

The cockpit chaos continued.

"Sing-, single-, single-engine checklist, please," said Gannaway, never a stutterer until now.

"Where . . . is it?" Warmerdam replied.

The first officer had his own question: "Where's the airport?"

Seconds later, Atlanta Approach Control gave him his answer: still six miles away.

Now passengers noted a rural mosaic: fields, trees and scattered houses.

Fech stood in the back at the U shape formed by rows 8, 9 and 10. She noticed Lucille Burton standing by her back-row seat, as if confused. "What are you doing?" Fech asked. "You've got to sit down now." Burton's husband helped fasten her seat belt.

A voice deep within told Fech to hurry back to her jump seat.

So she headed up the aisle. Standing by the front row, she realized they had broken through the clouds.

0:38 to impact

From the cockpit, speed and altitude dropping, the pilots saw a 10-acre field to their left near Carrollton.

The plane trembled. In the cockpit, a synthesized male voice warned that the plane's altitude was only 500 feet.

The landing gear and flaps remained retracted.

"Too Low Gear," The Bitch warned.

Fech saw the trees and quickly backed the last few steps toward her jump seat. She shouted, "Brace position! Brace position! Stay down! Stay down!"

In row six, the nervous flier, seeing the pines, shut his window shade for the first time. He told himself, You're dead.

The Maine shipyard worker in row seven flashed a painted-on smile to the stranger next to him and said, "Good luck." The computer trainer from Minnesota stared back, fear in his eyes.

The teacher's mother made the sign of the cross.

A few raised their heads one last time to look. Seeing this, Fech shouted, "Heads down! Heads down!"

Behind her, in the cockpit, she heard the recorded warnings through the closed panel door.

She'd never heard The Bitch before. The sound terrified her.

0:08 to impact

Still four miles short of West Georgia Regional Airport. Fech tightened the strap on her jump seat. Holding her head upright and rigid, she placed both hands beneath her thighs in her own brace position. She shouted to her passengers, "Hold on, y'all! This is going to be rough!" She closed her eyes.

Several breaths from impact, Warmerdam didn't hear her. He'd dreamed of flying since the age of 6. Now, nearly touching the trees, feeling the plane's vibrations, hearing the warnings and The Bitch, and then Gannaway's voice in his headset, "Help me, help me hold it, help me hold, help me hold it," Warmerdam squeezed the steering column, continuing the fight.

Just then, he imagined his young wife. A pretty, final image. Warmerdam left his goodbye to her on the cockpit voice recorder: "Amy, I love you!"

Impact

Its left wing tilted slightly downward, ASA Flight 529 hit the trees at nearly 140 miles per hour - slamming through 360 feet of pines in about two seconds. First the plane sliced off treetops, then went lower, chopping off trunks.

Forty feet past the trees, the left wing struck the hayfield and tore off.

The left side of the plane's nose, near the rudder pedals by the captain's left leg, dug into the earth.

In the front of the passenger cabin, a woman screamed.

In the second row, Brumfield, no longer wanting to be a flight attendant, whispered, "Oh God, oh God, oh God . . . "

COMING MONDAY: Fire in the field

Part 2

9  M I N U T E S ,  2 0  S E C O N D S By Gary M. Pomerantz Journal-Constitution Staff Writer The little propeller-driven plane with 29 people aboard fell out of the sky. At 140 miles per hour, it sliced through treetops and bore down on a hayfield in Carrollton. The left wingtip gouged the earth first. The wing ripped away from the body of the plane as dirt clods and rocks flew. Jet fuel spilled from its ruptured tank. The plane's nose skidded on its underside. Then the one-winged plane went airborne again, bouncing up a ridge about 100 feet, the first killing steps in a macabre dance of physics. A plane made in Brazil and bound for the Mississippi coast became a carnival ride gone out of control. It skidded through the hayfield, its belly cutting a narrow groove 4 inches deep and 150 feet long. The fuselage shattered into two primary sections. Twisted by torque, the front section - carrying the flight crew and several passengers - spun to its right, with its nose finally stopping at a right angle to the plowed groove. The back section slid tail first, then rolled onto its right side, so curiously situated that its underbelly nearly faced the pilot's window. The plane was in pieces, connected only by a common fate.     Renee Chapman, the young Army veteran in the second row, felt the plane's belly sliding across the ground. Then she felt dirt hitting her face. The Baltimore teacher, Dawn Dumm, screamed but couldn't hear herself over the sound of ripping metal. The nervous flier in row six, Chuck Pfisterer, his body tossed like a rag doll's, waited for the blackness to come. In the eighth row, construction engineer David Schneider opened his eyes. The luggage compartments shattered, and the cabin depressurized, creating a wind tunnel of flying plane parts. He saw a few seats break and dislodge. All the while, Schneider held his right arm against an inner wall of the plane, feeling the ridges of the ground and fearing a rock or stick might break through a window. Schneider's left arm fended off flying objects: luggage, metal fragments, another passenger knocked from a seat across the aisle. Then, through an opening, he saw gray sky. One row ahead, Kevin Bubier's face was pinned against a window as the plane skidded. Bubier watched helplessly as grass and dirt were plowed up like a furrow just inches from his eyes. Please don't break! Please don't break! he pleaded with the window. Up front, flight attendant Robin Fech opened her eyes to an eerie darkness. Slumped in her jump seat, she looked to the floor. Damn, I've lost a shoe! Her thoughts cleared. My God, we've crashed! Wires, cables and broken pieces of the plane hung from the ceiling, poking through at odd angles. The metal kitchen galley had fallen across the aisle. The main passenger door to Fech's right had buckled in. She was in her own cave, all darkness except a solitary orange light. She heard a few moans, then more. "Get out!" she screamed to her passengers. "Get out of the plane now!" Fech knew what they did not, that the solitary orange light was fire.     The first firetruck took five minutes to reach the hayfield. If nine minutes and 20 seconds of falling to Earth seemed like a flash, the next five minutes in the field would seem like an eternity. That's because of fire, more feared than instant death. A moving, raging monster, it breathed 1,800-degree flames that could leap from jet fuel to pantyhose, from alloy metal to human flesh. So hot are such fires, they burn through clothes, skin and muscle. After nerves are burned, there is the body's great gift: The pain goes away.     On the right side, between rows four and five, two passengers quickly slipped outside through the hole in the fuselage. Fearing an explosion, Chuck LeMay and David McCorkell ran from the plane as fast as they could. A safe distance away, McCorkell slid to a stop in the grass. He saw no one else emerging from the plane. Slowly, carefully, he and LeMay made their way back, keeping a safe distance at first. The two men had gotten out just in time. While they fled, 175 gallons of jet fuel spilled from the right wing, forming puddles outside the opening they'd just run through. In less than a minute, that opening would fill with flames. Mike Dabrowa / AJC illustration   Chapman in row two had blacked out just as the dirt hit her face. Unconscious for only seconds, she awoke to find her seat had dislodged, and she was lying atop the passengers in 2B and 2C. Chapman saw blood on her T-shirt, but it wasn't hers. It came from Angela Brumfield, the aspiring flight attendant below her in 2C, who had a cut above her eye. Suddenly, the man in 2B, engineer John Tweedy, pushed Chapman's seat off his chest. His adrenaline rushing, he climbed through a wide hole in the plane's right wall, which had peeled back like aluminum foil between the second and fourth rows. It provided the primary escape route in the plane's front section. Stepping to the ground, Tweedy offered a hand to the dazed and bleeding Brumfield, who followed him out. Panicked, Tweedy fell to the ground, then stood. Fech, still inside the plane, appeared behind him. She had crawled through the pile of broken plane parts. "Move!" Fech shouted at Tweedy. Then she emerged, in stockinged feet, her head bleeding, her right wrist broken. Running out on the wing, she shouted, "Move it! Let's go!" In the field, she saw passenger Alfred Arenas, his pants and sneakers on fire. Hopping and twisting, Arenas didn't know what to do. He heard Fech shout, "Roll on the ground!" As he did, he felt an indescribable heat melting the sneakers into his feet. Ed Gray   Barney Gaskill   At almost the same moment, Barney Gaskill, a 57-year-old Ohioan, pulled his colleague, Ed Gray, from a heap of broken plane parts in row four. "Don't worry, buddy, I'll get you out of this," Gaskill said. He pulled Gray across the aisle and through the opening that Fech had just passed through. As Gray emerged from the fuselage, his pant leg caught fire. He heard someone yell, "Roll on the ground, Ed!" In his confusion, Ed Gray looked around for someone named Ed. Gaskill pushed him down. Gray rolled and the fire went out. He winced and suddenly held his chest. Gaskill pulled and cajoled Gray to a safer spot in the field, all the while fearing that his buddy was having a heart attack.

In the back of the fuselage, where the plane had turned on its right side, the rear exit door offered no escape: It was pressed against the ground. The only way out for the remaining passengers was the hole in the fuselage between rows four and five. To get there, they would have to walk and crawl over the windows and seats, the fallen baggage and debris, balancing with their hands pressed against overhead luggage compartments.

Reaching the hole, they would find it blocked by flames, through which they could see only a blurred sky.

A line of passengers formed. They were pushed back by the heat.

"We'll have to go through the fire," Charles Barton, the Virginia deputy, called from the back.

Several seats in the back had broken loose. A few were intact, leaving strapped-in passengers dangling from seat belts. The young deputy, Tod Thompson, allowed Sonya Fetterman, a 37-year-old mother of three from Texas, to slip down from her back-row seat onto his shoulders as she undid her seat belt.

Thompson moved Fetterman and Lucille Burton, a grandmother, in front of him. Thompson didn't want to be the type of man who took the lifeboat before the women.

For an instant, the wall of flames lowered. Seeing this, Alan Barrington, in row six, thought firetrucks must have arrived. He believed the plane must have landed near a runway with firetrucks on alert. But then flames filled the opening again, and Barrington, no longer imagining firetrucks, looked to the passengers in line behind him. They all looked like zombies.

Barrington yelled to those at the front of the line: "You have to go through the fire! Just go! Go! Go!" He saw one man disappear into the flames. And then another.

One by one, they lunged into the fire. Barrington leaped through and landed with a somersault. Somehow he was only grazed by the flames.

But the fire was intensifying by the second. For those who followed, survival would be random.

 
 
Two minutes after ASA Flight 529 skidded to a stop, black smoke was billowing from the fuselage. Nearby grass burned, too, with flames spreading 15 feet or more from the fuel puddles.

On the far side of the field, several neighbors dialed 9l1.

Passenger Thompson saw Lucille Burton in flames, rolling in the grass and calling for help. He had seen her and her husband, Lonnie, board the plane in Atlanta. They were leaders in the African-American community in Asheville, N.C., and Thompson was struck by their kind faces: "They looked like somebody's parents."

In the field, he ran to Mrs. Burton, stripped off his shirt and used it to suffocate the flames. "Roll!" he screamed, and she did. But she was soaked in fuel, having stumbled through a puddle outside the burning plane. Thompson could smell fuel on her as he fought to save her. Finally, the flames put out, she moaned in the grass.

She asked about her husband.

All around him in the field, Barrington saw passengers on fire: standing, running, rolling, screaming. He ran to one man ablaze in the grass. Barrington heard others yell, "Roll!" so now he yelled to the man: "Roll! Roll!"

Drenched in fuel, flames shooting out from all over his body, the man didn't roll. He's like a log in the fireplace, Barrington thought. He yelled, "I've got to take off your clothes! Take off your pants!" On the ground, the man undid his pants and pushed them down his hips. Barrington couldn't even see the man's face beneath the flames as he grabbed the man's pants and threw them off. Now the man's white socks, saturated in fuel, were in flames. Barrington used his bare hands to smother them, burning his fingers in the process.

The man's shirt still burned. So did his arms and hair. Barrington tried to rip off his own shirt to use against the flames, but pain stabbed at his shoulders, dislocated in the crash.

So Barrington undid his shirt one button at a time as the man burned in the grass. Once removed, the shirt didn't help, so he furiously grabbed fistfuls of grass and dirt and threw them at the man, to no avail.

Barrington turned and walked away from a man whose name he still does not know. Tears in his eyes, he was certain this man was beyond help.

Just then, Fetterman, her shorts on fire, raced past. Her scream, pained and prolonged, would long haunt Barrington.

Fetterman rolled in the field and unbuttoned her shorts, which Barrington grabbed and flung through the air.

Fetterman lay naked in the grass until Thompson gave her the shirt and shorts from his overnight bag. She fanned her severely scorched arms up and down in a cooling motion as Schneider consoled her. "You're going to be fine," Schneider told her.

Fetterman, thinking about her toddler daughter back home in Texas, said, "My baby! She's so beautiful. She's so cute."

"You are going to see her again," Schneider said. The rest of Fetterman's upper body looked free of burns, and Schneider figured that youth was on her side. He smiled at her and said, "We made it!"

Across the field, Chapman had walked from the fuselage in a daze. She had seen the trees and the grass and wondered, Where am I? The answer, she had decided: "In the middle of nowhere."

Then she came upon a middle-aged man, burned, in the grass. He wore a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a tie. But his pants were gone, his shoes melted and his legs burned.

Bond Rhue

He told her his name was Bond Rhue. A 56-year-old U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor, Rhue was en route to Gulfport, where he was investigating riverboat gambling. After the propeller broke, he had changed seats with Lucille Burton, who didn't want to sit near an emergency door.

He asked Chapman if she thought he was going to die. "No, you're not that bad," she said. His face and arms appeared sunburned, his hair singed. "You just look like you've been laying out in the sun," she told him.

Rhue asked, "Is my tie crooked?" His tie, the one featuring pigs, had melted, so she just nodded.

"Would you straighten it?" Rhue asked.

Chapman took a deep breath. Then she said, "Why don't we just take it off . . ."

When the plane came to a stop, the large metal galley storing drinks and snacks had collapsed across the front row, trapping Baltimore teacher Dawn Dumm.

Her mother, Mary Jean Adair, couldn't push away the wreckage. Suddenly, hydraulic fluid sprayed, scalding Dumm's head, shoulders and back. She tucked her chin and screamed.

So did her mother: "Please, help my daughter! She's being burned!"

No one came, but the spraying stopped.

Together, mother and daughter again pushed at the metal galley. As it lifted, Adair thought she saw the silhouette of a man helping. But no one was there.

When Dumm pulled her left leg free, her foot flopped out, nearly severed.

Through the debris of shattered overhead bins and the broken galley, Dumm saw the flight attendant's vacant jump seat. Then she looked back at the passenger cabin.

Thickening black smoke made it seem as if someone had hung a sheet across row four. All around her, the seats were empty.

Dumm pulled herself over her seat and into the second row. With her mother in tow, Dumm gazed out a hole in the right wall and saw, perhaps 20 feet away, a peculiar image - flight attendant Fech standing with a man wearing only his underwear and another holding a briefcase.

"We're still here!" Dumm screamed as the black smoke billowed higher. "We need help!" She saw Fech's head turn, but no one came right away.

She would have to do it alone, and slowly. Inching out the hole and toward the front edge of the wing, only a few feet above the ground, Dumm heard her mother scream: "Dawn! Help me, I'm being burned!"

Behind her, Adair, 64, was stretched out across the wing where flames from underneath shot up and scorched her.

Dumm inched back up the wing and pulled her mother closer. They crawled to the ground. There, Fech and several passengers came to them.

Adair was in pain and unwilling to crawl farther from the plane. Several passengers helped move her a few feet. Thompson asked, "Do you have grandkids?"

Yes, Adair said.

"Then why don't you get up and move so they can see you again?" Thompson said.

Dumm held her dangling foot as she crawled away from the plane; she moved well ahead of her mother. Fech couldn't persuade Adair to crawl, so she called out to Dumm, "Your mother won't move unless you call her!" Dumm called back to her mother, encouraging her to keep moving.

Crawling through the field, Dumm noticed the maypop blossoms growing on vines in the field. She watched a butterfly and reached out to grab it. It flew from one maypop to another, and she crawled after it. The pain in her foot worsened, and the field grew darker.

Dumm knelt in the field and recited the Lord's Prayer.

She saw three neighbors standing on a hill. She waved to them. Elbert Eason came and reached out to her and said, "I won't leave you." Dumm pulled from her fanny pack the goodbye note to her husband and sons: "You are the Lights of My Life. Always, Mommy. Lucas and Zeke: Be Good Always. Prayers."

Eason took the note from her. Dumm asked him to call her husband, and she gave him the home phone number. Eason promised to call. He got a towel, wet it with a fire hose, then used it to wash Dumm's face.

Check on my mother, Dumm said. Thirsty, so thirsty, Dumm held the towel in her mouth, biting it to fend off pain and also to drain whatever water it held.

When the firetrucks and rescue teams pulled up, the hayfield resembled a Civil War battlefield, filled with casualties, confusion and surreal images.

There, in the grass, Maine shipyard worker Bubier saw a woman in a flowered dress. "You OK?" he asked. She said her back hurt, and she trembled with fear. Bubier calmed her, and they embraced. Sitting now, Bubier felt pain in his right leg, and he pulled his pant leg up. He saw his own burned flesh. "Aw, man!"

The woman in the flowered dress flinched. "I don't want to see it!" she said.

Bubier suddenly grew faint. The woman in the flowered dress soothed him. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he thought of the woman in the flowered dress. Who was she?

He wondered if she might have been his guardian angel. Whoever she was, he would always love her.

Walking around the plane's tail, a shirtless Barrington came upon another passenger: a burned man, in his 30s, wearing only underwear and walking toward a house at the edge of the field.

"Why didn't you get burned?" the man calmly asked Barrington.

Barrington didn't know what to say. What could he say?

"I don't know," Barrington replied, never making eye contact.

The burned man, Michael Hendrix, a Maryland engineer on his first week of a new job, walked past the first house and went to the house next door. There, on the porch, he met Polona Jeter.

"I was in the plane," Hendrix began. "Yes," Jeter said, "I saw."

Hendrix said he needed a phone to call his wife.

Jeter brought her phone out to the porch and dialed for him. In her nervousness, she dialed the wrong number. He took the phone, dialed, and got his answering machine. Jeter heard Hendrix say, "Linda, my plane crashed . . ."

Next door at the home of Paul Butler, owner of the hayfield, Barrington called his wife in Roswell. He didn't want the Butlers to pay for the call, so he used his business calling card.

Butler was passing out blankets to injured passengers in his field when he found Rhue. "I'm burned over 75 percent of my body. I'm going to die," Rhue said.

Butler lied, "Naw, you just look red. It ain't that bad." But the government prosecutor insisted, "No, I've got third-degree burns. I'm going to die!"

Putting a blanket over him, Butler said, "Just be calm, man."

In the field, an EMT carrying a portable oxygen cylinder discovered Jennifer Grunbeck, 29, who was on a business trip while her husband and young son were at home in Maine. A local minister sat beside Grunbeck and told the arriving EMT, Bud Benefield, "This is Jennifer."

Benefield looked at Grunbeck. She had second- and third-degree burns over her body; her blouse was shrink-wrapped onto her skin; and she had singed flesh near her mouth and nose, indicating she'd breathed fire. "Jennifer, can you talk to me?" he asked, not expecting an answer.

"Yes, I can," she said.

Benefield didn't think she'd survive. He figured her airways would swell, she'd go into shock and then her organs would fail. He immediately put her on high-flow oxygen. Then he told the minister, "I don't want you - or the man you work for - to leave me."

Rescue workers arrived with a stretcher, and Grunbeck was carried to an ambulance. "Please, don't drop me," she said. She asked Benefield to tell her husband and son she loved them. Benefield thought, How could any human being survive a burn like this? Later, doctors estimated that Grunbeck had been burned over 92 percent of her body.

At the ambulance, Benefield quietly told the waiting paramedic, "This is one of the worst burns I've ever seen."

The paramedic said, "Have you seen my patient?" Benefield looked inside the ambulance and saw Lucille Burton, her hand curled into a claw, pleading, "Please, God, let me die!"

Meanwhile, the nervous flier, Chuck Pfisterer, had wandered across the street, where he approached two elderly women.

He had removed his pants earlier in an attempt to beat back flames consuming another passenger. Now he made quite a sight: He wore a bloody T-shirt, boxer shorts, black shoes and socks. In one hand, he held his belt and wallet.

"I hate to bother you," Pfisterer said, "but could I have a glass of water?" The elderly women led him inside their home, where he phoned his wife in Connecticut.

 
 
In the chaos and confusion, no one knew that someone was still alive in the plane.

Matt Warmerdam

The young co-pilot, Matt Warmerdam, was pinned in his cockpit seat and had no one to help him in his claustrophobic trap: melted plastic in the ceiling dripping on his shoulders; flames, flickering from behind, burning his back, legs and left arm. He never saw the flames but felt them - at least as long as it took for the burns to advance to third degree, at which point his nerve endings, and the pain, died.

Warmerdam saw pilot Ed Gannaway next to him, curled in a fetal position, unresponsive. The official report would indicate that Gannaway, 45, died of burns.

Warmerdam had been flying with Gannaway for a month and a half. He liked him, especially his sense of humor and his devotion to his wife and kids, whom he talked about always. He also had enormous respect for him as a pilot.

To Warmerdam, a 28-year-old Californian, flying wasn't merely a job, it was his passion and his craft. He had moved beyond flight school and Piper Warriors and was living out a childhood dream. His wife cheered him on, and his final words before impact were a tribute to her: "Amy, I love you!"

Now, as he was trapped in the cockpit, Warmerdam concentrated on procedure: The captain is dead, the chain of command comes to the first officer. We are in the middle of nowhere . . .

He reached for the small hatchet stowed for emergencies, but he barely had room to swing it. Breaking a 4-inch hole in the thick glass side panel exhausted him.

As smoke filled the cockpit, Warmerdam cried out, "I need some help!"

TUESDAY: Second chances

Part 3

McCorkell watched Warmerdam freed from the cockpit and carried away by paramedics, his burned arm held rigid in the air. He won't survive, McCorkell thought.

Walking to a triage area hastily set up across the field, McCorkell heard the screams and moans of burned passengers. He felt the eyes of a rescue worker upon him. McCorkell, his shirt ripped open across his chest and with small burns on several fingers, translated the rescue worker's look: You S.O.B, you ran, didn't you? How dare you survive when women and old people were not taken care of! Even though the rescue worker never said a word, guilt rushed through McCorkell.

In an ambulance, Baltimore teacher Dawn Dumm, her leg and foot in pain, cried and bit a towel. A Catholic, Dumm prayed, first silently and then aloud, "Our Father . . .Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven . . ."

Beside her, Warmerdam, an oxygen mask over his mouth, mumbled something. A nurse leaned closer to hear. Then the nurse told Dumm, "He wants you to keep praying out loud."

So Dumm continued her prayers aloud.

Matt Warmerdam at a Griffin salvage yard with with the cockpit glass that became his link to survival. Now Warmerdam keeps it - and the hatchet used by passenger David McCorkell to break it - at his new home in California.

The first officer and McCorkell shared a broken cockpit window and a hatchet 14 inches long.

Before it came to that, when ASA Flight 529 was about to crash in a field filled with grass and clover, the two men's thoughts about the most important things in their lives crystallized as never before.

Warmerdam, 28, a commercial pilot for five months, called out to his wife in the final words on the cockpit voice recorder: "Amy, I love you!"

McCorkell, 37 and twice divorced, had no one to call for. He traveled so often that his two teenage sons had no idea where he was. As he prepared to die, McCorkell was alone, bitterly so.

Warmerdam had been chasing a dream, McCorkell a paycheck. One lived to fly, the other flew to make a living.

Since the crash, their lives have been redirected in ways they could not have imagined. Where once Warmerdam, with a young man's strut, focused on flying and on a wife he cherished, now he fought only to stay alive. When his survival was assured he turned to newer challenges, like buttoning his shirt.

McCorkell, on the other hand, was barely scratched in the crash, but his dash from the flames would become the first steps in a search for new meaning to his life. Over time, that search would make him feel freer and less empty.

Two years after the crash, Matt Warmerdam visits with Robin Fech at her home in Macon.

Warmerdam, with burns over 42 percent of his body, spent 100 days in the burn unit at Chattanooga's Erlanger Medical Center, then six weeks in the cardiac unit. Even as he was fed 9,000 calories a day intravenously, his weight fell from 208 pounds to 139 on his 6-foot-3 frame. Potentially fatal infections threatened him.

"It was a minute-by-minute thing," Amy Warmerdam says. "He got off the vent(ilator). A week later, his lung collapsed. . . . It's a total cycle. You can't get excited, you can't get down."

McCorkell and several other passengers phoned him during those first few months. But Amy and his doctors permitted no contact in person or by phone.

Flight attendant Fech and her boyfriend, Chris Price, then an ASA mechanic, were the first allowed in, six weeks after the crash. They barely recognized Warmerdam. His face had swollen from water retention; his hands were bandaged; his entire left side was burned raw to the crown of his head; his left ear had been virtually seared off.

Fech sat at his bed and asked to touch him. He said yes. She put her arm on his.

Everyone in the room cried.

Price remembers Warmerdam, medicated with morphine, asking him that day what had caused the crash. "He couldn't tell if it was his fault," Price says. "Matt had a lot of guilt, survivor's guilt. He just didn't know if he and Ed [Gannaway, the pilot] had done it right. And they did. . . . He was a brand-new first officer, and I guess that would be the fear of anybody."

Fech reaffirmed to him that he and Gannaway had done superlative work in bringing the plane to the ground, and she thanked him for it: "You saved my life."

Warmerdam feels he owes his own life to Amy, his steadfast companion and protector since the crash.

They met in 1990 in Warmerdam's hometown, Santa Rosa, Calif. He sold stereos while saving money for flight school; she attended junior college.

A mutual friend sent her into the store. Warmerdam not only sold her a stereo, but gave her the employees' "family discount." They soon became inseparable, and he began pretending to pull an engagement ring from his pocket. Finally, he did it for real, on a knoll in the California wine country reachable only by gondola.

Matt Warmerdam in the cockpit of a Brasilia, the same kind of plane that crashed in Carrollton.

He had wanted to fly planes since he was 6. Amy says, "He loved flying. I mean, how lucky somebody is to find what they really, truly love and are able to do it." They went to Florida for flight school, and in the spring of 1995, Warmerdam was hired by ASA. He called it the realization of "22 years of dreaming."

Warmerdam never envisioned a crash nor what it would be like to wear a stretchable body stocking designed for burn victims. It was like a wet suit, uncomfortable, and caused him to itch. He wore it in pieces: a long-sleeved shirt, and pants down to his ankles; and then, reconfigured, pants down to his knees.

Over time, he relived the crash as if he were watching a movie: "I'm looking from standing over my shoulder, in the doorway (of the cockpit). I can see myself and Ed doing everything we do."

While he underwent rehabilitation therapy the spring after the crash, the Warmerdams got an apartment in Chattanooga.

Late one night, in a Winn-Dixie, Amy pushed Matt's wheelchair with one hand, a shopping cart with the other.

They passed a lobster tank. "Wait! Stop! Stop! Stop!" Matt said. For 20 minutes, they watched lobsters step on one another's head.

"Hey, look at this one over here!"

"I'm going to come and get you!"

"Oh, no! Don't step on my head! Oh, nooooooooooo!"

They laughed and squealed. They were, in Warmerdam's words, "just being dorks."

Happy to be alive, happy to be together.

The night of the crash, McCorkell stood before a mirror in a Carroll County motel room. He reeked of jet fuel, an acrid smell. He saw shards of cockpit window glass in his dark hair and mustache. He wanted to shower. But first he felt compelled to stare. "I couldn't believe that all of my parts were there. I couldn't believe that I got through this in one piece. . . . You feel guilty, but you feel very happy."

A short time before, he had been sitting outside a hospital in Bowdon with several other survivors who had minor injuries.

Smoking a cigarette, McCorkell watched the sun set. "Did you think you'd ever see another one of those?" he asked. He didn't expect, or get, a reply.

But he knew then that "every sunset is important and not to be taken for granted." And he vowed to live life to the full. "Make no more excuses!"

Given a second chance, he decided life wasn't only about obligation - it also was about possibilities, many wondrous.

He was not proud of his accomplishments. At 17, in Northfield, Minn., he married a high school classmate. They had two sons before the marriage dissolved. He retained custody of the boys.

For the next dozen years, he answered the call of responsibility and obligation: He raised his two sons as a single parent, cooking macaroni and cheese and Hamburger Helper, the only recipes he knew. Early on, he worked in a grocer's warehouse. Determined to obtain a college degree, McCorkell became the oldest person in a room of people taking the SAT the same week he was the youngest enrolling a kindergartner.

His degree at the University of Minnesota four years later earned him a promotion into the grocer's purchasing department, where he helped to develop a computerized buying system.

On the job, he met Lila Gilbert, who would become his second wife. She had two sons, too: an instant family of six. Dave and Lila shared the 40-mile commute to Minneapolis and spent 12 hours a day together.

But then McCorkell accepted a job working for a competitor, training clients to use his new employer's software programs. His travel was designed to be 50 percent of the job, but it was more like 75 percent. When he called home from the road, he heard Lila's stress and her growing complaints about the kids.

So he called home less and they grew apart.

"Really," McCorkell says, "all that traveling caused my marriage to break up." So amicable was the split after six years of marriage, they used the same lawyer to draw up the papers.

He was close to his sons, but his frustration with them grew. He had urged them to pursue education, but neither met his expectations. After all he had given up for them in his own life, McCorkell says, "they didn't want to achieve, so now it's like a double whammy."

He had been divorced 13 months and was en route to Mobile, Ala., when the plane crashed in the hayfield.

He emerged from the crash suffering from an affliction that can be as debilitating as burns: loneliness. He determined to transform himself and to be less inhibited.

Three months after the crash, he climbed into a three-seat plane and flew over Newfoundland, with a client's son as his pilot. McCorkell didn't even mention the ASA crash. He didn't want to talk about it or his fears.

Besides, fear of flying was illogical, McCorkell decided. "If you were in a car crash, you'd probably get in a car again."

In April 1996 - about the same time Matt and Amy Warmerdam were giggling at the lobsters in Chattanooga - McCorkell moved with a son to Alaska. He rented a two-bedroom apartment in Anchorage and took a pay cut to work as a buyer for a grocery chain.

He moved there to watch gorgeous sunsets and catch 60-pound fish in rushing rivers - the perfect spot for introspection or, as he says, "to figure out: What the hell is going on with Dave?"

To get beyond the horror of the hayfield, he had moved to a place nearer Siberia than Carrollton.

In Alaska, McCorkell pursued solitary escapes: fishing, skiing, hiking, golf, reading.

A new home, a new life, a new Dave.

Sitting beside a glacier-fed stream outside Anchorage last summer, snow-capped peaks in every direction, McCorkell explained: "When you live in the city all of your life, and towns, you start thinking that everything is man-made. This is not. This is nature to the Nth degree. And I guess you feel a little bit dinged up from what man has done anyway. . . .

"So I came out here to check out what nature and God has given us. It's a real good feeling I got.

"I feel safe. I feel like I could heal here."

Even so, McCorkell recognized a more personal truth: Amid the grandeur and beauty of the Alaskan landscape, he still was alone.

On Aug. 21, 1996, the first anniversary of the crash, Amy Warmerdam pushed her husband's wheelchair onto the tarmac of a small airport.

In New Mexico on a family visit, they explained to airport officials Matt's need to fly that day.

They boarded a Cessna: Amy in back, Matt next to the flight instructor. Warmerdam wore his burn stocking and had just undergone the first of several surgeries on his left elbow.

To him, this first flight since the crash was only a formality. He knew he would fly again, so he told himself, "OK, let's get this over with. This will be fun."

The pilot took them up for 15 minutes. He did a pattern, a touch-and-go. "I was totally stoked to do it," Warmerdam says. In flight, he put his splinted left hand on the yoke and steered a little.

To Warmerdam, the experience was about "conquering." He sought to regain his supremacy over the flying machine.

He says he wants to fly a Brasilia again, and has one purpose in mind: "Me kicking its ass instead of it kicking mine."

Several times, he has been back in the ASA training simulator, an exact replica of the Brasilia cockpit, in Atlanta. He had worried: "Would it be claustrophobic? Would the sounds scare me?"

Inside the simulator, he watched the video re-creation of Runway 9-Right in Atlanta, a nighttime landscape complete with images of car and truck headlights along the interstate. "It was like I had never left," he says. Brightening, he assesses his performance that day: "Ex-cellent!"

Warmerdam weighs more than 240 pounds now, having sailed past his goal of 199. Sporting a beard, he talks about the crash, and himself, with bravado and humor. (When Fech moved into a home in Macon this year, Warmerdam gave her a fire extinguisher as a housewarming gift. "A little twisted," he admits with a laugh.)

Warmerdam's healing process took him in the spring of 1996 from Chattanooga to the Dublin, Ga., home of Jackie Gannaway, the pilot's widow. In her living room, Warmerdam faced the three sons he often had heard Ed Gannaway talk about, and he offered to answer their questions.

They asked powerful ones: Was their father scared? Did he know he was going to die? Did he suffer?

Warmerdam told them their father was too busy to be scared, that he and Ed thought they were going to land the plane safely and that, no, he did not suffer. Jackie Gannaway remembers that Warmerdam's scars were severe, but "his spirits were good."

"Obviously, it was an intensely personal thing for me to be the last person to be with him alive," Warmerdam says. He hoped his visit would help the boys: "It was like a gift I could give back to them to say, 'This is what your dad was like, and you should be very proud of him.' "

Matt and Amy Warmerdam also visited Carroll County, wanting to thank Steve Chadwick and the fire rescue crew. Warmerdam urged Chadwick to ask questions: "You won't hurt my feelings, just ask it."

Chadwick took a deep breath. He saw the first officer's heavy scarring, his disfigured left ear. He asked, "Did we do you a favor?"

"Hell, yeah!" Warmerdam replied. He said he had much to live for, "and let's face it, the world is a fantastic place with me in it."

His recovery has been slow and hard. In one cosmetic surgery, doctors put a tissue expander beneath his scalp, then inflated it with saline twice a week for several months. "I had this big bubble head," he says.

He dreads an upcoming operation on his left hand: His thumb must be repositioned and the web space between it and the index finger reduced. Pointing to the left wrist, Warmerdam says, "They need to recover this whole area with a better skin cover so that it's more pliable. So they are going to take a muscle out of my abdomen and graft it over the top, kind of starting over my (left) wrist" and "take a tendon out of my foot, graft it to hook this finger back up. . . . That's the one I'm not looking forward to."

Last spring, the Warmerdams purchased a gated hillside estate with a rose garden and swimming pool on a Marin County hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay.

He says he doesn't want to be known as "Matt the Millionaire," and he stresses that his crash settlement has not changed "who I am, what I value, the ideals that I hold onto."

"There's a whole lot of life left for me, and this hasn't ruined me. And I'm fighting back. I'm going to be OK. And I already am OK."

Here the first officer moves beyond dependence on others and reclaims parts of his life, little by little. "Instead of acting tragic," he says, "it becomes more of a game." Once he marveled over his ability to pour a glass of orange juice. In the summer, he drove to a mall and got Amy a birthday present. "It felt great."

He talks of flying again. "Now that I don't have to, I want to. It's what I do, you know? It's unfinished business," he says. "If I'm going to quit, I want to quit when I say I want to quit."

He spends a lot of time with doctors and in physical therapy. He swims and lifts weights. Recently, he and Amy had special handrails installed in the house to accommodate his needs.

Warmerdam says they hope to have children someday, but that is a "down-the-road type thing." He and Amy recently got a golden retriever puppy. Its name is Runway.

The surgery on his hand will come early next year. "I don't see very far past that," he says.

"I tell people that God just laughs when you make plans anyhow."

Emotion overcomes him only when he talks of Amy. When he looks at her, an emotional depth and devotion are obvious, as if an ideal has been met. In June, in celebration of their fifth anniversary, they recreated their honeymoon with a trip to Carmel on the California coast. "I almost didn't make it," Warmerdam says.

"And, of course," he would add later, looking across the kitchen table with tears in his eyes, "I'd like to thank the wonderful love of my life over there, who is the reason I still want to be here and the reason this life is OK still."

"I'm not the same person I was," McCorkell says. He pinpoints January 1998 as the moment when "the feeling of not knowing the answers went away." All at once, he stopped worrying about his sons, felt totally accepted by friends and even quit smoking. His transformation was under way. "I'm not the same person I was," McCorkell says. He pinpoints January 1998 as the moment when "the feeling of not knowing the answers went away." All at once, he stopped worrying about his sons, felt totally accepted by friends and even quit smoking. His transformation was under way.

Several months later, he saw Lila Gilbert, his ex-wife, for the first time in two years, at her son's wedding. "We hit it off," McCorkell says.

Before the crash, he says, "I would have looked the other way from my wife - and let my pride take over." But now, seeing himself differently, he saw her in a different light. Before he returned home to Alaska, Lila told him she loved him. McCorkell didn't know what to say - until he arrived in Anchorage eight hours later and phoned from the airport.

"I feel the same way," he told her.

He was to see her next at his son's wedding in June, two months away. But Dave and Lila couldn't wait until then, so she flew to Anchorage for a long weekend.

In July, McCorkell packed his things and drove a sightseeing 5,500 miles back to the Midwest.

He moved in with Lila.

She sees big changes in him. "Dave values family a lot more than before," she says. "He's taking more time to listen now. He says that nobody should have to see what he saw (in the hayfield). How could that not change your life?"

They are talking about giving marriage another try.

An irony is that Lila has his old job - the one he had at the time of the crash. "We've discussed it. We both want jobs that don't require travel," McCorkell says. "We both want jobs that will let us make our relationship the No. 1 priority."

"It's weird that this brought Dave and I closer," Lila says of the crash. "I don't want to lose the guy. I want him to be in my life always."

The meaning of the crash came to McCorkell one day in the Alaskan frontier: "What good is it to see this if you can't turn to somebody and say, 'Isn't that beautiful?' "

WEDNESDAY: Surviving with guilt

Part 4

In the rush to escape the fire consuming the broken fuselage, five passengers saw the man who had been in seat 5A. He was trapped and unresponsive.

They had to make a quick decision: Do I stop to help this man, or do I flee? Each survivor's choice would long weigh on his conscience.

Jim Kennedy: The death of the 62-year-old father of seven would haunt several crash survivors for a long time to come.

Other passengers had trampled the man, perhaps not noticing him beneath the fallen luggage and torn plane pieces.

As the plane had skidded across a Carroll County hayfield, the 10-row fuselage had broken apart. The rear section rolled on its right side, throwing the man across the aisle and onto the right windows. His 6-foot-4 frame lay between seats and overhead compartments, his head near an opening ripped in the fuselage.

That opening was the only escape for 14 passengers in the cluttered back section. A few got out quickly, but those in back needed longer. Sixty seconds and more.

Too long.

Fuel pouring from the ruptured right tank puddled and caught a spark. The opening filled with flames, a blue-orange veil through which passengers could make out only the blurred sky, and then not even that. The plane's metal skin burned at 1,800 degrees, an apocalyptic heat.

A line formed and a shout came. "You have to go through the fire! Just go! Go! Go!" With no room for a running start, passengers could only lunge through the veil, unsure what they�d find on the other side.

The five passengers came upon the man from 5A only seconds apart: three young men first, then two Virginia deputy sheriffs.

In a spontaneous act, the three young men - Alan Barrington, Kevin Bubier and David Schneider - stopped to help him. They cleared debris away, tugged at him and called out to him. Schneider recognized him as a colleague from work; the others knew him only as someone in trouble.

His blue-jean shorts, they would all remember. One would recall seeing the man�s eyes closed; the others thought they were open but vacant. One spotted a small bleeding wound on his forehead. Another remembered his gray hair, brushed to the side. The man did not respond to their shouts.

Then, after a few moments, the fire found new fuel. The three men felt a jolt in the fuselage and heard screams outside.

Now they chose self-preservation, leaning into the flames.

The Virginia deputies - Charles Barton, a law enforcement lifer, and his young colleague, Tod Thompson - were the last to arrive at the fiery opening. Barton spoke to the man lying near the opening. Then he leaped, disappearing into the flames.

Standing before the flames, fearful they would melt his face, Thompson heard the man from 5A call out: "You've got to help me out!"

Tod Thompson

Feeling the heat, Thompson replied in a rising voice, "You've got to get out!" Then, holding an overnight bag in front of his face, Thompson followed Barton into the fire.

Flames snake-licked Thompson for a split second before he ran 15 feet into the hayfield. Seeing green grass, he fell and rolled. The flames, almost miraculously, had only singed his arms.

Looking back, he saw the man from 5A, 62-year-old business consultant Jim Kennedy, step outside the fuselage. Flames consumed Kennedy as he rocked backward, as if in slow motion, and fell.

Kennedy crawled through the flames. He made it 15 feet outside the fuselage.

In a few moments, flight attendant Robin Fech came to him there. He rolled slowly on his back, energy dissipating, his body discolored and swollen. Fech slammed her vest against his midsection to put out lingering flames. Within a few minutes, Kennedy died in that spot, his hands and knees locked in the air.

Returning home to Virginia, Maine and Roswell, Ga., Schneider, Bubier and Barrington heard friends and family say they'd been touched by God, somehow chosen to survive.

But their own thoughts were darker, as if from a fevered dream: What if I really was a coward? Why did I live when others died? Why didn't I do more to help?

A haunting, debilitating survivor's guilt grew from their belief that they might have done more to save Kennedy.

Layered into Thompson's response was the death of Charles Barton, his 57-year-old friend and role model. The young deputy returned home convinced he'd broken the lawman's code: "Don't come back without your partner."

In the hayfield, Barton was lying in a smoky heap 30 feet from the fuselage. Rushing to him, Thompson crouched over a man who didn't resemble the one he'd seen minutes earlier: His hair, eyebrows and clothes were gone, his breathing labored.

Thompson said, "We're going to get you out of here! Hang on!"

"This hurts," Barton said, his voice barely audible. "Man, this hurts."

Wanting to reassure his friend, Thompson searched for a soft, smooth spot on Barton's body to place his hand. He saw only charred skin. Finally, he gently touched Barton's stomach.

"Don't push so hard there," Barton said, wincing.

Later that afternoon, in a West Georgia hospital, Barton asked to see Thompson. Doctors only allowed the young deputy to walk past the open door to Barton's room.

That evening, Barton was transferred to the burn unit of Atlanta's Grady Hospital, and Thompson followed. Told that only family members could enter Barton's room, Thompson pleaded, "I'm the only family he's got here!"

So he put on a scrub suit and saw his friend's disfigured face and an array of tubes pumping fluids into him. Only hours from death, Barton was unconscious, but Thompson called out to him in his thoughts: I'm here with you, buddy!

 
 
Emotional aftershocks struck these four survivors hardest in the days that followed.

Two nights after the crash, Alan Barrington, the 35-year-old human resources manager, felt his conscience stalking him.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Roswell about 10 p.m., his dinner growing cold, his wife on the phone across the room, Barrington thought about those who died in the crash: people he did not know but might have saved. That included Jim Kennedy.

He'd spotted Kennedy in the fuselage, eyes closed, beneath debris. He'd reached to him and said, "Get up!"

But then Barrington was distracted by another passenger, who was dangling from a seat belt above, screaming. In the confusion, Barrington reached to help the dangling man, then forgot Kennedy, leaving him behind.

Now, realizing funerals were only a day away, Barrington's thoughts took him to the grave sites of Kennedy and the others.

Did you do everything you could to help my father/my mother/my son?

He imagined a grieving family asking him this question. Barrington thought, Unless you died in the attempt, you did not try hard enough. He heard himself say aloud, "I'm alive," and so the answer had to be, No, I didn't do everything I could have done.

This admission brought tears and sobs. He fell from his chair to the floor.

As his four young children slept upstairs, thankful for his existence, Barrington cried for more than an hour. His wife, Beverly, finally reached his mother by phone in Texas and pressed the receiver to his ear. From the kitchen floor, Barrington's sobs went quiet as he heard his mother's prayers.
 
 
David Schneider, wearing a bandage on his right hand, came to a small, lush Connecticut town to attend the wake of his colleague.

David Schneider

Schneider had known Kennedy only by face and reputation. The 28-year-old engineer had intended to introduce himself to Kennedy when their flight arrived in Gulfport, where their company was fabricating gates to control the flow of the Ohio River. But in a twisting of metal and fate, Schneider met Kennedy for the first time inside the burning fuselage.

Now, four nights after the crash, Schneider stood at the funeral home before Kennedy's widow and eight grown children. He introduced himself, said he had been on the fateful flight and might have been the last person to speak to Kennedy.

Softly, he asked, "Do you want me to tell you about it?"

Nancy Kennedy's voice cracked. Yes, she said.

"I saw Jim," Schneider said. "I tried to pick him up." The Kennedy children craned their necks to listen. "Jim! Jim Kennedy! C'mon, we've got to get out of here!" Schneider said he heard a small explosion and screams. The fire had intensified.

"Maybe I should have tried to carry him out." Schneider shook his head and tears came. "I'm sorry. I hope he didn't die because of me."

Nancy Kennedy put her hand on Schneider's shoulder. She mentioned the autopsy. Though it said the cause of death was "thermal burns," no soot was found in her husband's breathing passage. Maybe he wasn't breathing when the flames got him, she said.

All of the facts and witness accounts were not in yet. But hearing this, Schneider thought, He didn't blink at me. His eyes didn't move. That's why he didn't get up! He was already dead!

Schneider felt astonishing relief. He was thankful Kennedy had not died in anguish and that his own inability to help the man hadn't caused his death.

 
 
In Maine, Kevin Bubier, a 37-year-old shipyard worker, suffered nightmares about fire.

Kevin Bubier

Bubier saw it in his dreams: a holocaust, hotter than anything he'd ever known, surrounding him. He awoke in a fright and then his terror worsened, for flames still threatened him even with his eyes open.

The nightmares returned Bubier to the man near the fuselage opening.

Bubier and Schneider had propped up Kennedy. And for a moment, Bubier held Kennedy's hand.

Bubier had noticed blood on Kennedy's forehead and a faraway look in his eyes. Then flames roared into the open space, creating the image in his nightmares.

He lunged through those flames but later would remain unclear about one detail: Was he still holding Kennedy's hand when he lunged, or had he let go?

 
 
In northern Virginia the day after Kennedy's wake, a procession of law enforcement cars stretched along a country road toward Leesburg, blue lights flashing, en route to the memorial service for Charles Barton.

That day, Tod Thompson felt all eyes upon him. He thought people blamed him for Barton's death, and the 33-year-old deputy took their stares to say, How can you come back when Charlie didn't?

Thompson's wife, Pam, also sensed stares. But she believed people were looking at her husband not because he came back alone, but because he came back at all.

Thompson took it hard. He worried that people would talk. Just being there shamed him.

Outside, rain falls on Newtown, Conn., and in Nancy Kennedy's front yard, a maple tree's leaves, brilliant red, stir in the wind.

A widow of nearly three years, she is sitting in a cozy living room with daughters Meg and Maddy, recalling Schneider's appearance at the wake. "Dave Schneider kept asking for our forgiveness," she says. She shakes her head. By reaching out to her husband, Nancy Kennedy says, Schneider "gave us a gift."

She had been married to James Gerard Kennedy (Jim to friends, Gerry to family) for 37 years; they had seven daughters and a son. He gave them playful nicknames, including Moopie, Be-so (as in "How can you be so cute?), Haymouse, Genie Beanie and Handsome Harry Backstage. He so impressed them, they thought the Kennedy half-dollar had been named in his honor. He had a slew of grandchildren, who called him Poppy.

Now, as the rain falls, they remember stories.

Like those long-ago rides to Sunday Mass in the Volkswagen Beetle.

Nancy: "We used to get the whole family into a little Volkswagen."

Meg: "Three in the luggage well, three on the seat, two on laps, and you, Mom, would hold the baby."

And those Sunday afternoon grab bags that he filled with candy. He would call for his kids to line up. And now, recalling those moments, Nancy, Meg and Maddy sing out his call: "Youngest to oldest, oldest to youngest, middle to ends!"

Nancy Kennedy, a small woman with a coarse smoker's voice, was a junior at Fordham University when they married; he had graduated from Niagara University. His professional career would be varied, and they would move a lot.

A jock, fit, trim and tall, Kennedy drove himself hard and knew the value of a buck; he proudly duct-taped his running shoes so they'd last longer. Because he often said, "My wants are many, my needs are few," his kids called him Gandhi.

Arriving in Atlanta after the crash to claim her husband's body, Nancy Kennedy saw a newspaper photo of Barrington with his family. She thought that if her husband had seen Barrington with his four young children, he would have said, "Let him live and I'll go."

Sometimes she gets angry at fate. Smoking cigarettes on the porch, she has stared at the distant hills and gotten angry at her husband for dying. She was so angry at Atlanta, since his last flight took off from there, she refused to watch the 1996 Olympics on television.

But there is an affirming perspective to the crash, Nancy Kennedy says. That several passengers thought to stop and tried to help her husband "says a tremendous amount about the human spirit."

"I don't know how I would have responded if tested," she says.

"I hate to get too truthful, but I would've high-tailed right out of there."

 
 
These four survivors have Jim Kennedy as their common bond. Returning home after the crash, they discovered a new uneasiness in their lives.

Entering the office of the Loudoun County, Va., Sheriff's Department, Thompson saw a portrait of Barton staring back at him each day in the foyer.

Schneider waited for a divine answer about what was intended for him next. The stress of Bubier's job in the Maine shipyards, once challenging, now overwhelmed him. Barrington, overcome by a spiritual imperative, no longer aspired to become vice president of human resources.

Of the four, Thompson's reaction to the death of Jim Kennedy has been the most analytical, what might be expected from a law officer and former military policeman. Yet, in a visceral way, he still feels guilty for the loss of his partner, though he could have done nothing to save him.

Thompson was the only survivor among the six passengers in the last two rows. A soft-spoken Midwesterner, raised on a farm in Renwick, Iowa (population: 287), Thompson did not seek psychological counseling in the immediate aftermath of the crash, unlike the three others. But his wife, Pam, says they "talked and talked" about the crash and she believes their talks were therapeutic.

The crash's effects on her husband, she says, have been subtle. "Tod has always been laid back, but with work now, he takes an even more relaxed attitude."

He agrees. "I cherish life more," he says. Back at work after the crash, Thompson stood outside an open window of a home where a man with a knife had barricaded himself after raping a woman. The man shouted to Thompson, "You're going to have to kill me!" Thompson replied calmly, "No, I don't think I'm going to do that." They talked more, and finally the man gave himself up.

Now, in his modest home on a dirt road in northern Virginia, Thompson lies on a couch with his daughter, Rachel, playing upon his chest. Rachel in April 1997 became the first child born to an ASA survivor. "God had a purpose for Tod staying on earth - to be a dad," a friend told Pam Thompson. Their second child is due in December.

Thompson has thought often about the moment Kennedy called out to him. Barton spoke to Kennedy in words he couldn't make out, then lunged into the flames. Then Thompson did just as Barton had done. Thompson believes that at that moment he thought, "The best thing for me to do is to show [Kennedy] which way I was going. And that's what Charlie did for me."

Still, Thompson has wondered if he did enough for Kennedy: "I want to feel I did that. But there is a moment that comes over me that I don't feel that I did."

In the end, he says, carrying Kennedy out "would have slowed me down. . . . It would have been double suicide."

He thinks about Barton every day, especially at the sheriff's office, triggering a troubling response: "Going into the building, seeing Charlie's old friends, the people he worked real close with, just puts me uneasy."

One of Barton's close friends, Investigator Eddie Fant, says Thompson once was a reminder of Barton's death. But no more: "Now it's not always that I see Tod and miss Charlie. Now I see Tod and I'm just glad he's alive." Fant still keeps Barton's picture over his desk.

Sometimes, Thompson says, he hides his uneasiness at the office by thinking about something else.

To make it easier, Thompson works outside the office whenever he can.

Unlike Thompson and Schneider, Bubier has difficulty recreating the moment. It seems he'd rather not remember it, and talking about it is hard.

When he finally does, he talks for two hours. But when his retelling comes to Kennedy in the fuselage, his voice catches. "Just give me a second," Bubier says.

Weeks later, in a Maine restaurant, Bubier still is uneasy discussing Kennedy.

"That's a touchy subject," he says. He'd rather not talk in a restaurant. He'll talk back at home, "in case I don't quite get through it."

"I mean, it will be quiet over there, and it will just be us."

The crash changed him, Bubier says. His job at the Bath Iron Works wasn't the same. Nothing was. His concentration and desire were gone. He sought simpler pleasures: training trotting horses, for instance, a favorite pastime.

Bubier asked for a demotion, from assistant dockmaster supervising a large staff to electrician responsible for no one's work but his own. His boss suggested Bubier give up the horses to improve his performance at work. Bubier, seeing the Maalox on his boss' desk, replied, "You don't get it, do you?"

To lessen his stress, he took the demotion and went back to the tools. But even then, tension and an emptiness prevailed. Several times he drove to work, pulled into the parking lot and suffered an anxiety attack.

He felt he needed to be home with his wife, Christine. So he'd head back home, and as soon as he got on Route 1, his tears would dry up.

"What are you doing back here?" Christine would say. "I've just got to be home," he'd reply.

Talking with a psychologist - about the crash and his guilt - helped. So did anti-depressants.

He wonders why he has struggled so: "I know people who went to Vietnam and saw horror upon horror upon horror, and they are leading what I call normal lives. I mean, I saw death. I saw horrible death. . . . but I got to go away from it after one day. They had to go back and do it again and again and again. . . .

"I'm just trying to find justification for why I shouldn't be able to just get on with it."

Once, months after the crash, he tried to imagine a silver lining. He thought about the money he might get from a legal settlement, and for an instant he relished how it might make him happier.

The next day, his lawyer called to say Sonya Fetterman, the 37-year-old mother of three from Texas, had died, the 10th and final fatality of the crash. Bubier chided himself: There, you S.O.B.! That'll teach you for thinking good things!

Bubier has been on a medical leave from his job since last winter, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and is unsure whether he'll return. "I'm OK as long as I know that I can be home and around my family," he says.

He is building a house near his hometown of Greene, Maine, where Bubiers date back for generations and where his 21-year-old daughter lives with her husband and infant daughter, Bubier's first grandchild.

Bubier's new two-story home sits on a lovely 24-acre green space, a river running through it. There's room for a barn and the trotting horses he has purchased and trains with his father, a veteran on the Maine circuit. It's a pastime Bubier would like to transform into a moneymaking career.

Here, where his past and future are rooted, Bubier speaks more easily about Kennedy.

Kennedy serves as a symbol of his internal struggles. Bubier says he does not recall letting go of Kennedy's hand when he lunged into the flames. "It's probably the worst feeling of the whole thing," he says.

He stares into the distance, trying to imagine the man from 5A. Suddenly he recalls his clothes.

"Did the guy have shorts on?" he asks. Yes, Kennedy wore blue-jean shorts.

"All of a sudden, I remember seeing bare legs under the [seat] cushions. That's weird. I never really thought of that until now."

Then he remembers Kennedy's sneakers. "And I remember white sports socks. They might even have had a red stripe on them."

Bubier shakes his head. "I remember that better than his face.

"Sometimes you'd like to go under hypnosis to see if you could figure it out. But that might be even worse of a nightmare than you'd want to deal with, know what I mean?"

Now, told that Nancy Kennedy has expressed her gratitude to him for "touching my husband" in that frantic moment, Bubier's eyes fill with tears.

"Certainly I don't need any thanks, that's for sure," he says.

"It's a sad thing."

Schneider felt cleansed after attending Kennedy's wake. Over the next 18 months, with the help of a priest, he came to terms with his emotions about the crash. Yet he still isn't fully satisfied; he struggles with the unanswered questions about the deeper meaning of his own survival.

In a conversation in his condo in Centreville, Va., Schneider demonstrates his movements after the plane skidded to a stop: He unstraps his imaginary seat belt, takes a couple of steps across his living room, bends to help an imaginary Kennedy, then acts out a leap into the flames, toward his sofa. "About 12 seconds," he surmises.

He is surprised to learn that other survivors struggle still over Kennedy. "I thought I was the only one that had an issue with him," he says.

He is even more surprised to learn, two and a half years after the crash, that Kennedy made it outside the fuselage. "I've got to live with what I did," Schneider says. "I know I made every effort. . . . If he would have moved or reacted to me, I would've tried to get him out."

Then he says, "Maybe there's fate to it."

Schneider, a lifelong Catholic, went to see a priest after the crash.

He had waited for changes to come over him, reasoning that God had saved him for a reason. But he came to a realization: "I don't feel like I'm much different."

Schneider had half expected to quit his job to become . . . what? A doctor? Later, after he left his company, he joined another construction engineering firm. Not the job change, or epiphany, he had expected.

His priest told him, "Maybe God was there and helped you or maybe He didn't help you. No one knows that but God." Schneider told his priest of Kennedy and of his own remorse and guilt.

"God understands you want to save yourself," the priest told him.

"Why did I live and the guy next to me died?" Schneider asked. "Does this mean I was saved for a reason?"

"You might have been or you might not have been," the priest answered. The reason, he said, might become apparent "tomorrow or it might not happen until you are 78."

"Or it might not happen at all."

Schneider told himself, "I just have to wait."

 
 
In a Cobb County restaurant a week after the crash, a waitress approached Barrington. He noticed her belt loops. Suddenly he was hit with an image of a man on fire. At the crash site, Barrington had flipped that man, using his belt loops. Now he sat blank-faced until the image passed. "The waitress probably thought I was a dummy," he says.

Alan Barrington

At home in Roswell, Barrington noticed how often fire appears on TV. Each time he saw it, he tensed or left the room. His 10-year-old son once threw himself in front of the TV to keep him from seeing flames. Barrington began wearing a baseball cap to pull over his eyes whenever fire showed up on his living room screen.

He has thought of Kennedy and how the plight of another passenger distracted him from helping Kennedy. "It's hard to explain to someone unless they have been in that situation," Barrington says. "How can you forget someone mortally injured at your feet? But you can do it. I did it."

Barrington's guilt took about six months to fall away. In time, he decided he had done the best he could at the crash site.

As his guilt receded, his faith emerged stronger than before. Reviewing his life, it seemed as if he had been programmed for this.

Years before, Barrington had attended Christ Unlimited Bible School in Kansas City. There he listened to speakers who had endured tragedies before finding strength in Christianity. Barrington felt an urge then to become such a speaker, and even prayed that God give him a story to tell.

Standing in the triage area in the hayfield, looking at the burning fuselage a dozen years after his Bible school days, he'd thought about this. Finally, he had a story to tell.

Barrington left his personnel job at Service Merchandise in the summer of 1997, two years after the crash.  Barrington created a one-man nondenominational ministry. He calls it the Driving Force Ministry; it consists primarily of public speaking and the writing of Christian books and magazine articles.

Since the crash, Barrington has told his story at churches and schools. A central theme is second chances. He has written about the crash for Christian magazines. He has tapes of his speech to sell, and he is writing a Christian handbook.

"I feel like God wants me to do this ministry," he says, but adds, "I'm not sure how I'm going to support myself four or five years from now."

He appeared on the "Sally Jesse Raphael Show" with other "miracle survivors," including a man from the Oklahoma City bombing. This year, he and his family moved back to Kansas City.

As a public speaker, Barrington gestures with his hands and walks as he talks; he speaks passionately of God, second chances and "the many miracles I experienced that day." Even so, his wife, Beverly, fears that if the relatives of those who died in the crash heard him, they might say, "We never got our second chance." She adds, "Maybe I'm too pessimistic."

"I absolutely don't have all the answers or pretend to," Barrington says.

But he says he knows who does: "I do believe you can have a peace about it and that God is in control."

Thursday: A haunted heroine

Part 5

Robin Fech had tried once to get back into an airplane. But she made it only as far as the flight attendant's jump seat near the door.

She kept that door open - and left through it when fear overcame her.

Her psychotherapist's plan was to slowly desensitize Fech to an airplane so she could fly again. First she did nothing more than park at the Macon airport to watch planes take off and land. Next she walked into the terminal. The first time she moved onto the tarmac, she cried.

Robin Fech: In top photo, Fech views the shattered cockpit of Flight 529 at a salvage yard in Griffin.

It was so unlike the person she had been, so full of sass and moxie that she once explained her nature with the laugh line, "I don't get my panties in a wad."

Now each step toward recovery revived the terror. She couldn't so much as use a curling iron without being reminded of the smell of fire.

A year and a month passed before Fech could step into an empty Brasilia identical to the crash plane and stay awhile.

Alone, she did a necessary thing. She sat in each of the 30 seats. Closing her eyes, she tried to become the passengers who fell from the sky with her.

She wanted to know what they had felt in the last nine minutes and 20 seconds of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529.

At home, Fech had diagramed the seat assignments. She knew Jennifer Grunbeck was in 4B, Jean Brucato in 4C. She'd drawn squiggly lines where the fuselage had broken in the ill-fated row five, where Jim Kennedy and Bond Rhue sat.

In seat 4A, she was Ed Gray, the Connecticut businessman. She looked out the window, as Gray had done after hearing the propeller break loose and lodge against the front edge of the wing. Yes, Gray could see what no passenger ever wants to see.

Now, alone in row eight, Fech saw again the young David Schneider, bursting with confidence. He promised to open his emergency door once the plane was on the ground, and she knew he meant it.

Sitting in the back row in 10B, she saw an older African-American woman standing beside her seat, turning in a circle. Lucille Burton had been confused.

From her diagrams, Fech knew that most of the passengers in the back three rows had perished.

She closed her eyes and saw them all again, alive and afraid, just as they were before the pine trees and the field.

 
 
Only three months before the ASA crash, Fech's father died of cancer. He had been a constant influence in her life, never more so than during his absence throughout her formative years.

Less than 48 hours after the crash, she was in a west Georgia hospital talking about him to the attending physician. She was suffering "acute post-traumatic stress disorder," the physician wrote in his report. "On top of this, I believe this woman (h)as some unresolved grief related to her own father's death in May." To break her cycle of agitation, he prescribed sedatives at fairly high doses.

How survivors respond to a crash depends upon who they were at the time of the incident: their temperaments, life experiences and coping skills.

Experiencing emotional trauma once doesn't necessarily toughen you for the next time. Sometimes it has the opposite effect: You become more vulnerable, as if your reserve of strength has been depleted.

Three years after the crash and Duane Fech's death, and a quarter-century after a divorce that took him away from her, Robin Fech delicately touched an old photograph of her father. He looks dashing as a young naval aviator in his hero suit. "Isn't he handsome? He was a glamour boy," she said.

God, she missed him and wished she'd known him. She wanted the thousand and more hugs any little girl would want from her daddy.

But as Fech sees it, her daddy abandoned her during her formative years after the divorce, when she was in high school. His death was the final abandonment.

After the crash, Robin Fech believed her performance in the air would have pleased her father. For once he would have been proud of her. She had had a chance to reconcile with him before he died, but didn't.

Now she thought, Damn him for dying!

The crash did not merely change Robin Fech's life. It became her life. She has thought about it by day, dreamed about it by night.

For her steely performance in crisis, she has received hundreds of admiring letters, including one that said, "I revere you, Robin Fech." Yet her emotions have played like a Rubik's cube, with that old self-doubt refusing to turn.

Talking about the crash is the only way she knows to get through it.

Friends, exhausted from her crash ruminations, have suggested that Fech get on with her life. "But they weren't there. They don't understand," Fech says.

Her passengers do understand. She keeps in touch with a handful of them. Several have phoned to thank her for what she did; others have written Christmas cards. ("You were instrumental in saving many lives. Happy Holidays! Love, Tod and Pam Thompson.") A few she embraced during a brief reunion in the hayfield orchestrated by a TV magazine show. She attended the New Orleans wedding of Angela Brumfield.

Retired Air Force Maj. Chuck LeMay, in his e-mails from Nebraska, calls her "Momma Hen." When a Comair plane crashed in a Detroit snowstorm nearly two years ago--another Brasilia, also with 29 aboard, killing everyone--Fech phoned several of her passengers to see if they'd heard and wanted to talk.

She searches still for new details about her crash. "I think there are a lot of secrets. People keep some things to themselves because they think it's important," Fech says. "But it's unfair. Every passenger has something they are keeping to themselves. Everybody who worked in the field through the emergency and after the recovery is keeping things to themselves to avoid the hurt and to avoid the gruesome details."

In November 1997, more than two years after the crash, Fech returned to work at ASA in the Macon office, part time. She answered phones. But that proved too much. She got nervous and discombobulated. Her job was simplified to filing.

That week she made her first flight. An ASA colleague said a seat was available on the next flight out; Fech took it, without time to back out. She flew as a passenger from Macon to Atlanta round trip, 35 minutes each way.

She made the same round trip several days later. The attendants aboard were friends, so they chatted the entire way. It was so easy that Fech didn't consider it a real test.

She hasn't flown since.

Fech took another medical leave of absence from ASA in April, citing post-traumatic stress disorder. She still is unsure when or if she'll return, though she remains by title a flight attendant.

 
 
Living alone in a new Macon home, Fech is 40 years old. "But I feel like I'm 80," she says.

Since the crash, she has been tormented psychologically as well as physically; arthritis and other pains have ravaged her body, which "is dadgum falling apart," says Clemmie Jordan, her sister and closest friend. Fech's right wrist, broken in the crash, aches where doctors inserted four metal pins and a plate. She broke her collarbone, too, though that wasn't discovered until later.

She has muscle damage in her left thigh and calf, arthritis in her neck and hands, and pain in her lower back. Her ears ring, and her teeth hurt from nighttime clenching.

All products of the crash, she says.

In the spring of 1997, a psychologist evaluating Fech concluded it was unlikely she would ever return to being a flight attendant.

Her mother worries. "Sometimes she is close to being the Robin she once was," Claudette Underwood says. "Then at other times she needs to be off in her own quiet place."

"Robin is sadder. You see it in everything she does," says Clemmie, who has spent a lot of time with her sister since returning to metro Atlanta last summer with her husband and children.

Fech's boyfriend, Chris Price, a Delta mechanic formerly at ASA, says their relationship was broken by the crash: "Back then, our age difference didn't bother us as much."

Price is 26, 14 years younger than Fech. But the way they had it figured, he acted older than his age, she acted younger than hers.

Together, before the crash, they sat on the porch until 3 a.m., talking about life and love. They took weekend trips to Lake Sinclair. Price fixed ASA planes; Fech flew in them. And if they didn't have a lot of money, they had each other.

Price says the crash changed that. "I want that fun, carefree, footloose person that she was then - and that she's not now," he says. His eyes, liquid blue, turn downcast. "I can't blame her for it. I can't blame anyone for it."

Through counseling, they are trying to repair their relationship.

"It's all intertwined," Fech says. "I have a fear of abandonment. Dad leaves in the divorce. Then I date this guy for 12 years and that doesn't work out. Then I get married and that doesn't work out. Then I date Chris and that's working out, and we have a plane crash, and (her job) at ASA doesn't work out. And then Chris . . . "

Those nine minutes and 20 seconds stand tall in Fech's life. Before those moments, when she became the stabilizing force in the passenger cabin, she was a 37-year-old divorced flight attendant making about $20,000 a year while working long hours, landing in towns such as Dothan, Ala., and Panama City, Fla., sometimes getting by on pretzels and Cokes.

Never before those nine minutes and 20 seconds had she acted so completely without self-doubt.

And not since.

Had panic swept through the passenger cabin, maybe no one would have survived.

Flight attendants don't always react so confidently. Last summer, a commercial jet suddenly dropped and rolled, injuring several passengers before leveling off. "Probably the worst part was the stewardess," a passenger said later. "She just couldn't compose herself. She was telling us everything was going to be OK, yet she was crying."

Fech's performance aboard Flight 529 draws people to her, especially flight attendants. Giving speeches, she luxuriates in the attention.

In those nine minutes and 20 seconds after the propeller broke, Fech calmed her 26 passengers and prepared them for impact. She acted firmly and in command, even lying convincingly that it would be no trouble to land the crippled plane on one engine.

Later she was celebrated on "Oprah" and posed for People magazine. She stood before Georgia's legislators, who gave her a standing ovation.

Fan mail poured in. One wrote, "You showed more courage in 30 minutes than most people do in a lifetime!" A flight attendant wrote to thank her "for making us look like something more than a glorified waitress." A man named Fech wrote to say he didn't know if they were related, but he hoped they were.

An official from the National Transportation Safety Board who investigated the crash would say, "I'd fly anywhere with that lady! Her courage is well-documented by passengers."

Passenger Alan Barrington on Fech's performance: "If someone told you that you had less than 10 minutes left to live, are you going to do your job? I know I'm not going to do mine."

Yet she has felt unworthy of such praise even as she has accepted it, much like the soldier returning from the foxhole to receive medals for having done nothing more than his job. Fech wonders if more lives could have been saved.

Before she left Tanner Medical Center in Carrollton three days after the crash, Fech asked her mother to wheel her into Dawn Dumm's room. She wanted to see every passenger and to check on their recovery. Fech felt guilty that she was going home first.

Once inside, she thanked Dumm, a Baltimore teacher, for urging her injured 64-year-old mother to crawl away from the burning fuselage.

Dawn Dumm

Dumm treated Fech coolly. She'd just undergone surgery to repair her nearly severed foot.

From her hospital bed, Dumm told Fech she had peered out of an opening in the burning fuselage and screamed for help. She saw Fech standing on the other side of the wing with two men, one holding a briefcase, the other wearing only underwear. Dumm said she made eye contact with Fech.

Dumm had one question: Why didn't you come back to help us?

Fech didn't remember seeing her. She didn't know what to say.

Fech's mother, Claudette Underwood, said, "Robin, could you not hear them screaming?"

"Well, no," Fech replied. "There were so many screams I heard." Then, turning to Dumm, Fech said, "I guess I didn't hear you."

At her home in Maryland nearly three years later, Dumm says black smoke billowing from the fuselage might have kept Fech from seeing her; maybe Fech didn't hear her distressed call after all.

Even so, Dumm says, while some ASA survivors "hold this great honor for her, I don't."

Dumm's early criticism has been "very hurtful" to Fech, Clemmie Jordan says.

"Robin has talked to me about it in anger, in tears, in confusion and in terms of 'Why? Why is she so angry with me? What did I do? What didn't I do?' Dawn Dumm made Robin doubt herself."

Fech believes her actions, particularly in the hayfield, have been embellished. "An emergency worker said I was directing them," she says. "I have had a lot of guilt about this. These passengers know I didn't do all this wonderful stuff that has been said about me."

This despite evidence that Fech in the hayfield - even with her wrist broken - was busy: trying to put out the flames on one passenger's shoes and another's chest, screaming at passengers to run from the fuselage, and directing a passenger who was using a hatchet to break the cockpit window.

So, to Dumm's criticism, Fech replies, "What she needs to do is talk to me, because I need to tell her my story. She thinks she's got one? I need to tell her my story, because where she was taking care of herself, with the foot hanging off and maybe she's trapped, maybe she's crawling up the hill, maybe she's worried about her mother, I'm taking care of 26 other people who are all as traumatic as she is.

"And I've got some anger about this stuff. I'm fed up with it."

Fech's parents met because of a plane crash.

In 1955, two months before her wedding to a Navy pilot, Claudette Underwood's fiance was killed when his jet slammed into a mountain. His squadron sent a close friend to present the U.S. flag at the funeral. The friend was Duane Fech.

A romance blossomed, and a few years later Duane and Claudette, then a Delta flight attendant, married in Athens, Ga. Two daughters were born, and then the marriage got shaky. Duane moved to South Georgia and soon started a catfish business. It wasn't clear to young Robin, only a third-grader, if they were to follow or if he had left them. In time, they joined him.

Their parents at odds, Robin and Clemmie clung to each other over the next six years; they became survivors and sisters in the truest sense. When the marriage broke up in 1973, Claudette took the girls to Athens, where she opened a dance studio. Duane went his own way, later remarried and became an occasional presence in his daughters' lives.

"We did not remain friends," Claudette Underwood says. But now she wishes they had in order to make the family breakup easier for her daughters and "letting them know that Daddy is still Daddy, and sharing them more with him than I did."

Through her teens, Robin danced ballet, and sometimes she rebelled, skipping classes at school. "Clemmie laughed her way through everything," Robin recalls. "I withdrew."

Over the next decade, she taught dance at her mother's studio, tried night school at the University of Georgia, then married at 29, but within a year regretted it. In 1992, she was herself divorced.

That fall, 34 years old and alone, Fech considered her career options: a paralegal, a respiratory therapist, something in telecommunications--or perhaps a flight attendant.

ASA hired her in February 1993. Never mind that she earned only $12,400 that first year: "It put food in my mouth." Besides, she loved her passengers. Her co-workers and frequent fliers became her family.

In the summer of 1994, Duane Fech found out he had cancer. After doctors removed part of a lung, Clemmie went to see him in Gainesville. She talked with him about the past and also about heaven; she closed their circle. Robin would visit him, too, but they had no such conversation. "What circle was there?" she says. "What we had was more like a spiral."

Two days before Duane Fech died, his daughters came to his hospital room. Drawn and ashen, soon to fall into a coma, he appeared to Robin "like a person in a coffin."

Now he looked to Robin and Clemmie. Duane Fech, who adored a round of golf and a good stiff drink, was not a wordsmith. But he felt pressed to say what he needed to say: "Girls, I recognize that y'all haven't had it that easy. . . . "

And that was all he said.

Loving him and angry at him, Robin Fech, three months before the crash, said nothing. She just cried.

 
 
Squinting into the ballroom lights of a Louisville, Ky., hotel, Robin Fech fidgets and tells her 250 listeners, "I'm not a speaker. I just tell a story."

It is September 1998 and she tells her story at an international conference of the Aircraft Rescue & Fire Fighting Working Group.

"We took off at 12:22," she begins. Then she exhales and sips water. "I'm sorry. Sometimes this gets emotional."

She has given maybe 20 speeches about the crash, mostly to ASA and Delta flight attendants. It is hot and sticky in the ballroom; Claudette Underwood fans herself with a program.

Fech says, "There was a tremendous jolt. . . . I thought we'd had a midair collision." The room is so silent, you can hear a distant spoon clink against a coffee cup. Fech tells of the nervous flier in row six, the way she lied about the crippled plane being able to land on one engine, and of her own fears.

She takes her listeners through impact and the fire in the hayfield. Her mascara is running.

She tells of her efforts to save Jim Kennedy, the passenger who burned to death in the field. Whispering, she says, "Excuse me." Her voice catches: "I have had terrible nightmares about his skin turning gray-green."

Lightening the tone, she says she saw a neighbor on the periphery of the fiery hayfield wearing a cowboy hat and lighting a cigarette. "And I'm screaming at him, 'No smoking, sir!' " She rolls her eyes.

"And I'm thinking, 'Why don't you just pull up a lounge chair?' " Laughter ripples across the room.

"I've had a bad time," Fech says later, again somber. "We lost 10 people, though not all at once. I know you all know how I feel."

She says she's still in therapy and advises these aviation fire rescuers: "Don't deny yourself the grief. And don't deny yourself the therapy--especially you men. Men can be so stubborn about that.

"Thank you for letting me talk," Fech says. "It does me good."

There is a standing ovation and praise:

"Very powerful. You can feel her emotions going up and down, up and down."

"She should tell that story to every flight attendant in America."

"Sad story. I give her a lot of credit!"

The next day, ASA and Delta offered nine short flights back to Atlanta.

But Robin Fech climbed into her mother's car instead. Together, they drove seven hours home.

Friday: The conclusion

Part 6

Knowing the propeller blade he worked on caused the plane crash, a mechanic now in Bible school prays for the passengers of Flight 529.

On June 7, 1994, 14 months before the crash, the recalled blade arrived in Bender's hands in the South Carolina shop. It was among 490 that failed ultrasonic tests and were returned to Hamilton Standard for evaluation.

Hired from a local pool of applicants, Bender had been at Hamilton Standard in Rock Hill for only six months. He had transferred from the company's nickel sheath and fiberglass repair area to work on taper bores, the hollow interior of propeller blades. A shop manager described Bender as "extremely conscientious," quite capable of following technical instructions and respected by co-workers.

He was earning about $12 an hour, more than he ever made working on cars, and some weeks he worked 60 hours; the overtime pay was good.

For the first time, Bender had his own insurance, his own house and a nice car. As he saw it, he had it all.

Bender believed his hands were his great gift, and over the next year and a half he worked on "a couple thousand" blades.

Working on blade 861398, Bender used a fiberoptic scope, a long rod with an eyepiece at one end and a mirror on the distant tip, to search inside the blade for evidence of corrosion, pits or cracks.

He found none.

But because the blade had failed ultrasonic inspections, Bender sanded, or "blended," the area inside the blade where the previous tests indicated a possible flaw.

He sanded off two-thousandths of an inch of material, believing this would eliminate whatever had caused the blade to fail inspection.

Bender's sanding would have dramatic repercussions in a subsequent blade inspection in which an ultrasonic beam was used to detect fatigue cracks. His sanding marks caused the ultrasonic beam to scatter, or diffuse, and thus fail to detect a crack caused by chlorine corrosion that extended below the surface.

Though Bender had not caused this crack, he unwittingly concealed it.

Blade 861398 passed inspection and in August 1994 was returned to ASA along with a Federal Aviation Administration airworthiness tag.

Installed on the left propeller assembly of an ASA Brasilia, the blade would make 2,425 flights over the next 11 months, transporting thousands of passengers.

But on Aug. 21, 1995, when ASA Flight 529, Atlanta to Gulfport, was more than three miles high in the sky, the fatigue crack split toward the face of blade 861398, then traveled around both sides of its hollow center, causing the blade to break.

In his job at Hamilton Standard, Bender well understood that human lives were on the line. His bosses saw to that. Whenever a plane crashed, whether jet or propeller driven, it was discussed at the morning meeting.

This was, he knew, a reminder "that it wasn't just some light thing that we were doing."

 
 
When news of the ASA accident came, details were sketchy. In Hamilton Standard's Rock Hill shop, Bender heard only that people had died in the crash and that blade failure was possible. This prompted a dark thought from Bender, who knew that ASA used Hamilton Standard blades: "I knew that every blade that had been inspected internally, I had done. . . . I was just devastated."

His manager sought him out to make sure he was OK. Only a few weeks earlier, Bender, the son of a baker, notified the manager of his plans to leave Hamilton Standard by the end of the year to enter Bible school.

Then he thought about the people in the plane and wished he could make it all go away, or switch places with them. He went outside the shop to be alone. He fought back tears, swallowing hard.

Colleagues came to see him. A few tried to take his mind off the crash by talking about other subjects. Others related Air Force experiences in which they'd seen mechanics cry over crashed jets; things got better for those mechanics, they assured, and it would get better one day for Bender, too.

That night, Chris Bender, living alone, went home and cried. He called his mother and sister to tell them what had happened.

Then he did the only thing he knew: He got before God. "And I really just laid it down before Him." Confused, the hourly mechanic asked God why this had happened. He asked for strength. "I knew I needed to be responsible for something that I did wrong."

Bender's worst fears were confirmed when he looked at the paperwork and saw his own writing: "CSB."

Twice the NTSB interviewed Bender; he even demonstrated for investigators his sanding repair on the accident blade. Investigators were impressed by his knowledge of repairs and by his assurance that, if he ever had doubts about a repair, he made sure to seek the advice of managers.

In November 1996, two weeks before the NTSB issued its accident report and nearly a year after he left Hamilton Standard for Bible school, Bender flew to Washington. There he was questioned under oath by attorneys representing ASA passengers. He had been warned that it would be difficult, and it was: a grilling intended to make Hamilton Standard pay.

In its final report, the NTSB determined that Bender mistakenly used a sanding repair authorized for a blade with a different type of inner surface. The agency found that Hamilton Standard's internal documentation and communication had "created confusion" that led to Bender's "misapplication of the blending repair."

Responding to inquiries for this story, Hamilton Standard said in a written statement that it "accepts full responsibility for the fracture of the blade which caused the crash" and that it "formally acknowledged liability for negligence . . . in the litigation arising from the crash."

After the crash, the company launched an extensive internal program that it says "resolved technical and operational issues." Further: "The loss of lives and the injuries resulting from this accident have saddened everyone at Hamilton Standard, and all of us at the company continue to express our deepest regret and sympathies to all those affected."

The company would not comment on Bender specifically but said all employees who worked on the accident blade "followed written company processes and procedures."

"It still bothers him," Amy Bender says.

She had known him, through discipleship classes, for several months before he ever mentioned the ASA crash. Unsure of how to respond, she prayed for him.

"Chris is a very peaceful person to be around," she says. "He's someone who has a lot of strength in his quietness."

She once feared his shyness would keep him from proposing. But in August 1996, a year after the crash, he bought a $20 ring from Kmart - "cheap cubic zirconium," he says, "one of those little engagement rings they sell in their jewelry department."

Then, beneath a Texas sky filled with shooting stars, he proposed. They married in the spring of 1997.

Chris Bender expressed sadness when he learned that Hamilton Standard, during companywide restructuring, closed its Rock Hill facility last summer. He still refers to his two years there as "the best secular job I ever had."

Now, sitting on a couch in a mobile home roughly the same size as the passenger cabin of ASA Flight 529, Bender has a few questions:

"How are the people doing?" Hearing that one survivor, Jennifer Grunbeck, was 92 percent burned and has undergone more than 50 surgeries, he nods, grimly.

But hearing that first officer Matt Warmerdam, though burned severely, talks of flying again, Bender allows a small smile.

"I've wondered," he says, "how the families are getting through all of this." Now he hears of Jackie Gannaway, the pilot's widow, and of her three sons, now fatherless. And of Dawn Dumm, who wrote what she thought would be a final note to her husband and two boys as the plane neared the hayfield; and of Dumm's 64-year-old mother, who survived the crash but died of a heart attack eight weeks later.

Bender listens to these stories - and others - expressionless.

"I guess one question in the back of my mind is: What did they find in the investigation? What was the final conclusion?"

Listening as portions of the NTSB report are read, his eyes tighten at the corners, and at certain moments he nods.

He has wondered about the crash survivors, and how he might like to speak with them. "I've often thought about that, but what would I say?"

There is a lengthy pause, and then he answers his question: "Let them know that I do care and that I haven't forgotten about them. I still do pray for them. I still pray that something good can come out of something so awful. And, um" - his voice quavers here - "if there was anything that was possible for me to try to do, I don't even know what."

Then he says that speaking to the survivors maybe isn't such a good idea.

"I don't know how they would take me," he says. "I mean, I figure some people would probably be bitter about it, and probably hateful toward me.

"And that's something I would totally understand."

"It still bothers him," Amy Bender says.

She had known him, through discipleship classes, for several months before he ever mentioned the ASA crash. Unsure of how to respond, she prayed for him.

"Chris is a very peaceful person to be around," she says. "He's someone who has a lot of strength in his quietness."

She once feared his shyness would keep him from proposing. But in August 1996, a year after the crash, he bought a $20 ring from Kmart - "cheap cubic zirconium," he says, "one of those little engagement rings they sell in their jewelry department."

Then, beneath a Texas sky filled with shooting stars, he proposed. They married in the spring of 1997.

Chris Bender expressed sadness when he learned that Hamilton Standard, during companywide restructuring, closed its Rock Hill facility last summer. He still refers to his two years there as "the best secular job I ever had."

Now, sitting on a couch in a mobile home roughly the same size as the passenger cabin of ASA Flight 529, Bender has a few questions:

"How are the people doing?" Hearing that one survivor, Jennifer Grunbeck, was 92 percent burned and has undergone more than 50 surgeries, he nods, grimly.

But hearing that first officer Matt Warmerdam, though burned severely, talks of flying again, Bender allows a small smile.

"I've wondered," he says, "how the families are getting through all of this." Now he hears of Jackie Gannaway, the pilot's widow, and of her three sons, now fatherless. And of Dawn Dumm, who wrote what she thought would be a final note to her husband and two boys as the plane neared the hayfield; and of Dumm's 64-year-old mother, who survived the crash but died of a heart attack eight weeks later.

Bender listens to these stories - and others - expressionless.

"I guess one question in the back of my mind is: What did they find in the investigation? What was the final conclusion?"

Listening as portions of the NTSB report are read, his eyes tighten at the corners, and at certain moments he nods.

He has wondered about the crash survivors, and how he might like to speak with them. "I've often thought about that, but what would I say?"

There is a lengthy pause, and then he answers his question: "Let them know that I do care and that I haven't forgotten about them. I still do pray for them. I still pray that something good can come out of something so awful. And, um" - his voice quavers here - "if there was anything that was possible for me to try to do, I don't even know what."

Then he says that speaking to the survivors maybe isn't such a good idea.

"I don't know how they would take me," he says. "I mean, I figure some people would probably be bitter about it, and probably hateful toward me.

"And that's something I would totally understand."

Epilogue

9 MINUTES, 20 SECONDS / EPILOGUE
'My mom was such a hero to me'

By Gary M. Pomerantz
Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529 was only a little plane that fell in an obscure hayfield.

The loss of life was not on a scale with that of TWA Flight 800 or Swissair Flight 111. More than 200 people died in each of those crashes, without survivors.

Yet the ASA crash is writ large across many lives. Nearly two-thirds of the people aboard survived - a miracle gift - and so this crash is not only about death, but life. In the three years since the crash, two children have been born to survivors, and two more are expected in December.

Plane crashes have their own immutable power and mythology. Strangers still come to the hayfield, morbid tourists who will park and stare; some even knock at Paul Butler's front door and ask to walk in his back yard.

Butler, a brickmason who views such matters literally, only shakes his head and says, "What is it they are looking for?"

*  *  *

Aboard the Brasilia, they were a community of 29.

And they are a community still, joined now by their families and everyone who rushed into the field to save total strangers.

Survivors found out who they were that day in a way most people never will. In the field, flight attendant Robin Fech says, "All layers were stripped away. It didn't matter whether you were white, black, male, female, dressed, not dressed. The only thing that mattered was whether you were breathing."

She learned a valuable lesson that day: "At the center, we are all basically good."

Passenger Ed Gray, the Connecticut businessman in the twilight of his career, agrees: "I used to think the world was filled with bad people and a few nice people sprinkled in." Because of the crash, Gray says, he views it the other way around.

Survivors have had limited contact with one another over the past three years. They're reluctant to stir the crash demons in others, let alone their own.

Nevertheless, they feel a powerful connection to those they know only by name or the clothes they wore Aug. 21, 1995.

Virginia deputy Tod Thompson has thought often about passenger Jennifer Grunbeck. At least five times, Thompson has driven his Loudoun County cruiser slightly off his patrol route to the home of Grunbeck's mother, Evelyn Patterson, whose address he'd gotten from Fech.

Grunbeck suffered burns over 92 percent of her body, the worst of the ASA survivors. Now 32 and living in New England with her husband and young son, Grunbeck has undergone more than 50 surgeries, with more to come.

Thompson never met Grunbeck but has wanted to ask about her. Yet each time he has driven by Patterson's home, unsure how she would react to him, he has driven off without stopping.

Hearing this, Patterson says she hopes he knocks on the door one day. "I really feel badly that Tod came that close and didn't come in," she says. "Please tell him that I'd love to talk with him."

*  *  *

Some families have reached out to a lost loved one; others have reached out to one another.

Hearing of his father's death, Rob Gannaway, the pilot's 9-year-old son, laid out his entire fleet of toy planes on his bedroom floor in Dublin, Ga., and didn't move them for three weeks.

One of passenger Jim Kennedy's seven grown daughters has tried to contact him with the help of a spiritual healer. Clare Kennedy believes that as her father died, he fell into the arms of his late brother, Buddy.

She takes refuge in the belief that he is at peace.

At the Grady Hospital burn unit, victims' families had prayed together. And so when the young minister Steven Wilkinson was buried in Gulfport, Miss., a month after the crash, Nathan Villarreal - the brother of passenger Sonya Fetterman - sang "The Lord's Prayer" at the funeral. In Maryland, the widow of Michael Hendrix and the companion of Bond Rhue, who met at Grady, still share a friendship.

*  *  *

The memories of some victims live on in ways unique and special.

Loudoun County, Va., Deputy Charles Barton is memorialized in a Washington monument dedicated to more than 12,000 law officers killed in the line of duty. Barton's etched name joins those of men gunned down by Billy the Kid in 1872 and Bonnie and Clyde in the 1930s.

Sonya Fetterman is memorialized in song. Her brother, Villarreal, cradled her in his arms as she died, saying, "Go to God now, honey." Later, he wrote a song in her honor and performs it with powerful feeling.

Mary Jean Adair is remembered by her daughter, fellow passenger Dawn Dumm, as a hero.

Adair, 64, died of a heart attack at her Pennsylvania home eight weeks after the crash. At the funeral, Dumm spoke from a wheelchair. "My mom was such a hero to me," she said. Without Adair's help inside the burning plane, Dumm said, "I wouldn't be here in front of you."

A mother herself, Dumm still has the goodbye note she hurriedly wrote her husband and two sons as the plane fell through the sky. She keeps it in a bank vault.

On Mother's Day, Dumm sends a card to Julia Eason in Carrollton. Eason and her husband, Elbert, came to Dumm's aid in the hayfield.

Julia Eason spent many nights at Dumm's bedside in Tanner Memorial Hospital, talking and reading the Bible to her. The Easons since have visited Dumm in Maryland, and Dumm has brought her husband and sons to see the Easons in Carrollton.

"We really formed a bond," Julia Eason said. "She almost became my child."

*  *  *

Passenger Angela Brumfield had applied for a job as an ASA flight attendant in part because she was ready to move on with her life, tired of waiting for her boyfriend to propose marriage. When she returned to New Orleans after the crash, her boyfriend was waiting for her. "I almost lost you," he said. Now they are married.

Many of the survivors still won't fly; some will, but only on big jets. The nervous flier, Chuck Pfisterer, has flown on jets several times since the crash, each time with his wife and friends - plus a couple of nips of Jack Daniel's.

He still won't fly alone. On a businesss trip, he drove a total of 42 hours, from Connecticut to Michigan and back, chiding himself all the way, "Come on, Chuck, you're more at risk on this highway than you would be in the air."

Two weeks after the crash, Pfisterer received a check for $13.80 from the Carroll County Sheriff's Department. The money had been found inside brown pants at the crash site. With a laugh, Pfisterer figures he was easily tracked down because he has a 52-inch waist.

He still has his brown loafers from that day. They are singed on the sides. Pfisterer has worn them on each flight since the crash.

My lucky shoes, he calls them.

*  *  *

This fall, in a crowded elementary school gym in Bowdon, four miles from the crash site, a student placed a long-stemmed red rose in a glass vase.

"Captain Ed Gannaway," a classmate announced.

There came the solemn, drifting sound of bagpipes, and then another student with another red rose.

"Mary Jean Adair."

Three summers ago, some of these children had rushed to the crash site, a few on bicycles, to see the plane that had fallen from the sky.

At their remembrance now, paramedics, firefighters, neighbors of the hayfield, Fech and passenger Alan Barrington were brought to tears. "There's a reverence here that I haven't felt in a lot of churches," Barrington said.

When the ceremony closed, there was a poignant final image: 10 red roses.

Fech and Barrington returned to the hayfield afterward, carrying the roses. Walking to where the fuselage had been, they laid a rose where the 10 victims were found, calling out their names as they went.

Fech placed eight, and Barrington the two representing the victims he had touched personally that day.

"Bond Rhue," Fech said.

"Sonya Fetterman," Barrington said.

"Lucille Burton," Fech said.

"Charles Barton," Barrington answered.

In a field once on fire, now there were flowers.

The Other Survivors

"9 Minutes, 20 Seconds" has told the story of 10 survivors of ASA Flight 529. Nine more survived:

Alfred Arenas, 40, still is recovering from burns over 40 percent of his body. An engineer by profession, he lives in Rome, Ga., but remains unable to work. Nine months ago, he and his wife celebrated the birth of their third child, a son. "I nearly died, and to have another child now is something very special," Arenas says. "Since I can't work, he keeps me company sometimes."

• Ed Gray, 66, lives with his wife in Westport, Conn. A chemical engineer, he was offered a lucrative job about six months after the crash but turned it down because it would have required flying on small airlines, something he's no longer willing to do. "I'm at the end of my career," Gray says, "and that [job] would have been a great way to cap it off."

• Jason Aleshire, 22, is an airman first class at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss. He married in 1997, and his wife, Kimberly, is expecting their first child, a son, in December. Several survivors consider Aleshire a hero for helping passengers on fire in the hayfield and for pulling a fire hose to the burning cockpit where the co-pilot was trapped. Some day, Aleshire says, he'll tell his son about the crash, "and about what I did. And if it ever comes down to it, hopefully he'll do the same. And I'll also teach him to never take anything for granted in life."

• Renee Chapman, 29, lives in Wiggins, Miss., and helps her sister with a carpet-cleaning business. She suffered head trauma in the crash and says she still suffers memory lapses. "I'm not as calm as I used to be. Little things set me off," Chapman says. "I used to have more patience; now I don't have any."

  

• Chuck LeMay, 45 (right), retired from the Air Force more than two years ago. He works in Nebraska as a software engineer and specializes in meteorology. He has flown only twice since the ASA crash, most recently a year ago. "It's getting easier to fly," LeMay says, "but I'm still scared."

• Jennifer Grunbeck, 32, suffered burns over 92 percent of her body. "We do ask for divine intervention - and we need it," her doctor at a Chattanooga burn unit said at the time. With a remarkable show of courage and resilience, Grunbeck, through more than 50 surgeries, has endured. She lives in New England with her husband and their 7-year-old son.

• John Tweedy, 42, left his engineering job in Gaithersburg, Md., in the spring of 1997 and now is self-employed. The hardest part of the aftermath was the funeral for a colleague he'd just hired, Michael Hendrix. "I kept looking at that coffin thinking, 'That could have been me,' " Tweedy says solemnly. "Mike had his whole life ahead of him, and now his son doesn't have his dad."

• Jean Brucato, 43, lives in Woodstock. Of the 19 survivors, she is the only one who chose not to participate in this newspaper series. Neither has she spoken with any other survivor over the past three years. At the time of the crash, a neighbor described Brucato as an accountant traveling weekly to Gulfport, Miss., on business.

  

• Barney Gaskill, 61 (right), an engineer living in Monroe Falls, Ohio, says, "It's rare that when I crawl into bed I don't think about some facet of the crash: What I could have done differently, or, 'I wonder who that was.' It doesn't last an hour, maybe just a few minutes." A three-month leave of absence from his job in 1996 and psychological counseling have helped. Still, Gaskill says, "It's amazed me how long this has stayed with me."