[UA] a moment

[thanatos at interaccess.com]

I was skimming through Salon.com, and clicked on a feature:  "Ask the Pilot".  I have a few college buddies who are now pilots, and I love to harass them at parties with points brought up here.  

This week's installment has a story so weird, it has to be UA.  What makes it really really weird is the possibility of a double ascension.  I've googled the incident, and can find no mention of their names.  Damn strange if you ask me...


>>>
It's annoying for World to have slipped my mind, especially after one of their planes was involved in a strange and infamous accident right here at Boston's Logan airport in 1982, when I was a 10th-grade airplane nut. 

On a cold, wet Saturday night in January of that year, a World Airways DC-10 landed on Logan's runway 15R, which at more than 10,000 feet was, and remains, the airport's longest strip. The plane, traveling 15 knots above the appropriate landing speed, missed its touchdown target and landed long, finally hitting the pavement some 2,800 feet beyond the threshold. Making matters worse, the crew had received a misleading condition report about the surface of the runway, which was ice-covered. 

The plane, its sophisticated anti-skid brakes scratching helplessly at the slickly coated asphalt, was quickly out of room. Realizing they could not stop, the crew steered the widebody jet to the right of the runway centerline, into the snow and mud but away from the long, wooden approach-light pier at the end of the runway, its landing gear digging huge, black trenches through the snow. The plane decelerated through a field, crossed a taxiway, rolled down a rocky embankment and finally came to rest after belly flopping into Boston Harbor. 

As it fell into the sea, the nose section of the DC-10, including the cockpit, forward galley and entryway, separated and broke away. Two people apparently were thrown into the ice-choked water and were killed. 

I say "apparently" because even though the water was shallow and rescue crews were on the scene promptly, their bodies were never found. Certain local lore accuses the two passengers -- a father and son from Massachusetts -- of having staged their own deaths to collect insurance money. They became lost in the ensuing chaos of the rescue, the story goes, and hatched their scam after discovering themselves on a list of missing passengers. Thus they've become New England's answer to D.B. Cooper, the parachuting skyjacker who jumped from a Northwest Airlines 727 in 1971. Like Cooper, whose remains and tattered chute may someday be discovered in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, the two men are probably dead, their ghosts haunting the grassy perimeter of Logan International. But nobody knows for sure. 
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