As a former reporter for both print and electronic media, I’ve seen my share of gruesome over the years, including flag-girl vs fully-loaded dumptruck, and carful of highschoolers vs speeding beer truck – none of which ended well - and a few suicides and autopsies here and there.
However none of those were a plane crash. The one plane crash story that does stick in my mind is the one I *wasn’t *at.
One late summer afternoon in the mid-1980s, my editor gets a call from the sheriff’s dispatch office: light plane down at one of the county’s area municipal airports. Casualties reported. This is the days before we all had cellphones, mind you. Everything had to be done by regular landline, and the paper’s stable of reporters, including yours truly, had to maintain contact with the editor as much as humanly possible in case of just such an event as this.
Problem was, every one of us was tied up with something else, and the editor was stuck at home with sick kids so *he *couldn’t go.
That left our intrepid style and fashion editor. I’ll call her Jane. Jane was a very good reporter – still is. She still works at that paper and writes great articles on more than just style and fashion these days. But not back then. So, as requested, she grabs paper, pen and camera and heads off to the crashsite. She had never done hard news like this, I add. Or had to take pictures quite like the ones she came back with.
Fast-forward to the next morning. Our deadline was noon for a daily afternoon paper, which meant your mornings were spent slaving over a hot word processor struggling to make said deadline.
I was no exception. I’m banging out the story on my murder trial, which had come back with a guilty verdict, so my focus is no wider than the width of my processor screen with DEADLINE looming in my near future. Which a moment later was suddenly taken up with something black and white shoved in front of my face.
I look up and it’s Brian - I’ll call him Brian – our house photographer. Brian is not young. Brian has been around a long, long time. Seen a lot of stuff. Photographed a lot of it, too. Has a really good eye, as all good photogs do. Good thing, that.
He says, “look,” wiggling what I finally realize is a still-damp photograph under my nose.
I noticed he glanced behind him to where Jane sat, directly across the bullpen from my desk and then back at me. I wondered why at the time, because Brian is never what I would’ve called low-key for any reason. It takes a minute for my brain to shift gears and process what I’m seeing. I realize it’s what’s left of a small plane, pretty much charcoal-broiled.“It’s a plane. This the one from yesterday?” I asked.
“Yeah. LOOK,” he says again, shaking his head at me in disapproval.
So I do. Again. And STILL I don’t see whatever it is he sees. “Yeah, Bri, it’s a plane. Not much left that I can see. So?”
He sighs with utter disgust, reaches over, and with his blue editing marker, starts making little circles on the paper. “NOW what do you see?”
I looked again and this time I nearly swore out loud in surprise and shock. Now that he’s drawn me A Roadmap, I can now clearly see what he saw: five white skulls sitting amongst a sea of nothing but burned- out debris. “Oh my god,” I whispered, handing it back to him. “Does she know what she shot?”
“Nope. Gonna leave that to Jack (the editor. Not his real name, either.) to tell her. Gotta get back to the darkroom. See if there’s anything on that roll we **can **use.” Muttering to himself – probably about the stupidity of us amateurs, off he went.
There were six people on that plane, it turned out. Crashed on take-off with fully loaded fueltanks. Only one got out alive. The rest burned to death. The sole survivor lived about another week before succumbing to burns. I suspect it might have been a left-handed gift from god, considering.
Jane did everything right, including a first-rate article. She just never realized what she was getting pictures of at the time. It shook her considerably when Jack did tell her later that day. Would’ve me too, and I took a lot of pictures myself. You’re too busy trying to get the shot to worry about much else.
I nearly got myself electrocuted at a traffic fatality once because of that mindset. I’m still here because a firefighter with a lot more sense than I, scooped me up onto the running board of a fire truck literally in the nick of time. I was snapping away at the scene - standing in a puddle of hose water. The power pole the car hit had taken a major impact – hard enough to finally jar loose a live powerline – which dropped right into the water I had been standing in a nanosecond earlier.
Brian did finally find one we could use, and Jane got her first above-the-fold story. She did tell Jack she hoped she never have to do one like that again. Can’t say as I’d blame her