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Why Did He Have to Die?
by Cecil Maranville
Dusk was approaching on the cold, snowy afternoon of January 13, 1982, in Washington, D.C., when the throttles of Air Florida’s Flight 90 were pushed forward to the takeoff position and the jetliner’s engines roared their response. Strapped into their seats were five crew members and 74 passengers, including a 46-year-old bank executive from Atlanta.
He could not have known that within seconds only he and five other people would still be alive. Nor could he have guessed that whether those few would live or die would be his decision.
Only 73 seconds after its takeoff roll, 103,000 pounds of aircraft slammed into the concrete and steel of the 14th Street bridge, then plowed through the frozen surface of the Potomac River. Only the tail section remained afloat in the nightmarish scene.
Six people, three men and three women, clung to their lives in the mangled remnants of the huge airliner bobbing in the freezing waters. Firefighters attempted to rescue the survivors from the shore, but were simply too far away to reach them. The cruel, sure progression of hypothermia had nearly robbed them of the ability to hold on during the 22 minutes that passed before the arrival of Eager 1, a National Park Service helicopter.
The bank executive was the first to have a rescue line dropped to him. To the astonishment of the rescuers aboard the helicopter, this man refused safety for himself and placed the line around another passenger. When that person was safely aboard the chopper, the line was again dropped to the banker. A second time he secured it around someone else, making a difference between life and death.
The third time the line fell to him, the third time he passed it to another. And the fourth. And the fifth. Five times he made a conscious decision to put the lives of the other survivors ahead of his own. He had to know that the threat to his own life increased with every passing moment. Yet, selflessly, he persisted in passing the life-saving line to others.
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