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Every once in a while a song gets in my head and just gets stuck there. And usually it’s some song I really hate, and I spend the next two or three hours trying to think of something (anything!) else while a hideous ditty rolls around my mind. Today, however, is an exception as I’ve been constantly humming a couple songs I really like. One of them, Paul Overstreet’s Heroes, has been causing me to do that little “bobbing head” thing for a couple hours. The chorus goes something like (I have this CD, so I better know it)…
Heroes come in every shape and size
Making special sacrifices for others in their lives
No one gives them medals, the world don’t know their names
But in someone’s eyes, they’re heroes just the same
The song is coincidentally appropriate today as we discuss Air Florida Flight 90, which crashed shortly after takeoff on January 13, 1982. As I recall the news coverage, the weather was pretty lousy in the nation’s capital that day, with snow squalls, icy conditions, and limited visibility. Schedules were completely shot, and all the flights at Washington National Airport (now named after Ronald Reagan) had been delayed several hours. Flight 90 was no exception.
Headed for Fort Lauderdale, the Boeing 737 (shown above) took flight over D.C.’s rush hour traffic, rose a few hundred feet, stalled, and then plunged into the icy Potomac River just after smacking the 14th Street Bridge. The crash was investigated and it was determined that the pilots chose not to de-ice the plane a second time after sitting for an extended period of time. In addition, the on-board engine de-icing systems were not turned on, so the ice and snow injested into the engines when backing away from the terminal didn’t fully melt.
73 of the plane’s 79 occupants died on impact, and the other 6 got out of the plane. But all of us that saw that accident on TV remember one of them in particular. The hero. The sixth passenger. When a rescue helicopter arrived 15 minutes later and dropped a rope, Arland Williams was clinging to the plane’s tail. But rather than take the rope himself, he passed it to another passenger, who was pulled up. Two ropes were dropped the second time, and Williams again handed them off to two others. When the helicopter came back the third time, the tail section was gone, as was Arland Williams, the crash’s lone drowning victim.
There were other heroes that day, like the guy that jumped into the water to rescue a lady who fell off the rope and back into the river. But Arland Williams could have saved himself on at least 3 occasions. Three times the rope was in his grasp, and three times he chose to give his second chance at life to someone else.
More than 25 years later, the details of the crash had faded and I needed some help remembering them. But I’ll never forget that 6th man in the water.
Heroes.
