Due Justice

Chapter 27

Tampa, Florida

Sunday 5:30 a.m.

January 24, 1999

Awoke to another glorious January day, with dawn in its infancy and ambient temperature fifty-five degrees. Carefully slipped away from my sleeping husband and ducked into the shower. Postponed my morning Java; I’d pick up a latte at the terminal. Sunday morning meant light traffic all the way to Tampa International Airport’s short-term parking lot. Smooth sailing along the surface streets, timing the traffic lights, and we arrived eight minutes after leaving our driveway; so quick, my hair was still slightly damp.

Parked Greta near the blue elevators, grabbed the photographs from her glove box, rode down to the third floor and hustled to slide between the tram’s closing doors. No way to speed up the tram ride, but when it stopped at Airside D I dashed to the Northwest Airlines gate. The gate agent barely looked up when she accepted my first-class boarding pass.  Walked aboard, plopped down in 2A, snugged my seatbelt, and checked my watch.

Elapsed time: twelve minutes. Not a personal best, but not bad. So far, the trip was working out as well as I’d planned.

A little extravagant to travel first class for my two hour and fifteen minute nap to Detroit, but worth it to skip chatty vacationers, screaming and seat-back kicking kids, and cranky businessmen crammed into coach. During my years in private practice constant travel had generated a limitless supply of frequent flier miles close to expiring anyway. In those days I seemed never to sleep anywhere except on airplanes. Back then I’d nod off before my plane left the gate. No more.

Today, I watched the departure show unfold as it normally did until takeoff. Twenty-five seconds after lift-off I’d completed my prayers and for the first time since August 16, 1987, failed to drop into immediate REM sleep for the duration of my flight.

The normal nap schedule had been stamped into my brain by the crash of Northwest Flight 255, the deadliest sole-survivor crash in U.S. aviation history and the first airline disaster I’d personally witnessed.

An unforgettable disaster and equally indelible miracle.

On Sunday night, August 16, 1987, flight 255 was bound for Phoenix. My flight was scheduled to depart thirty minutes later.

I’d changed my travel plans the day before. A second deposition had been added to our docket. Instead of a quick trip out to Phoenix and back on 255, our team now planned to start in California and then hit Phoenix on the way home to Detroit. I’d watched 255 load passengers at the gate, still angry that I wasn’t one of them because my opposing counsel had forced a second day of travel into my jam-packed schedule.

Flight 255 pushed back at 8:32 p.m., right on time.

Light rain drizzled outside, but storms were moving our way. Everybody needed to get out before the storms delayed everything to a snarled mess.

The DC-9’s engines started easily enough and 255 taxied to runway 3C, my runway, awaiting clearance for takeoff. The plane ran an abnormally long takeoff roll, almost all the way to the end of the runway, before it lifted off.

But thirteen minutes after push-back, at exactly 8:45 p.m., 255 rotated skyward for takeoff. And something went horribly wrong.

The plane never gained altitude.

Never soared.

It lifted less than fifty feet off the ground. A series of quick disasters followed.

Flight 255 rolled left and hit a light pole, severing a portion of its left wing.

Rolled right, hit another light pole, another, and the top of a building.

Belly-flopped into flames.

Bounced and skidded a wide fiery ball along Middlebelt Road dropping burning sections and killing two motorists on the ground in its wake.

After twenty seconds, Flight 255 slammed into the I-94 expressway’s eastbound overpass and exploded like a giant bomb flooding heat and smoke, destroying by impact forces and fire.

Only one passenger survived. A four-year-old girl seated in 8-F, traveling with her brother and parents. She was found still belted into the seat, 35 yards from her mother. She suffered broken bones and burns, but pictures featured a big pink hair-bow and purple nail polish and a beloved brown teddy snugged under her left arm. The Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News and countless national media described every conceivable detail about the “miracle child of Flight 255.”

Twenty seconds can be a lifetime. For 156 people one hot August Sunday evening, it was. But for the miracle child and me, twenty seconds defined our lives.

The girl was reunited with relatives and lived a devout life, I’d heard. I often thought about her and everyone who died that night.

After pushback I watched my fellow passengers and imagined 255’s travelers spent those last thirteen minutes getting settled, organizing blankets and pillows, opening books and magazines. On my flight, mothers comforted children and nervous fliers relaxed grips on the seat’s arms when the plane safely left the tarmac and continued to climb. On 255, passengers must have done much the same, too briefly.

For the first twenty-one seconds after takeoff on every flight, I pray.

Once airborne this day, my fellow passengers relaxed. Babies no longer cried with earaches, conversations resumed, couples squeezed loved ones, opened their books, closed their eyes. Window-side passengers admired the view.

Flight 255 went down twenty seconds after liftoff; normally, after twenty-one seconds, I do, too.

But not today.

Today, sleep was pushed aside by the riddle I couldn’t seem to solve:  Who killed Michael Morgan?