His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [263]
At four P.M., the two women were picked up by one of Frank’s employees and driven to the airport, where they boarded the small, luxurious jet, which was stocked with a fruit basket, liquor, cookies, cheese, and crackers for the twenty-minute flight to Las Vegas. The pilot and co-pilot greeted them and radioed the control tower for permission to take off.
The tower radioed back that the pilot would have to wait twenty minutes because there was another plane in the vicinity flying at a higher altitude. At four fifty-five P.M., the twin-engine Learjet taxied down the runway and disappeared into low clouds. Instead of making a scheduled right turn toward Las Vegas, the plane inexplicably turned left and headed for the San Gorgonio Mountains, forty miles off course.
The pilot, who had flown this route many times before, knew that the mountain range was in his path, but he couldn’t see it. At the altitude they were flying the precipitation that hit the ground as rain was a white swirl of blinding snow in the sky. He radioed the tower asking for permission to increase his altitude from nine thousand feet to seventeen thousand feet to escape the snow-capped monster looming ahead—the highest peak in southern California. The tower granted permission but retracted it. Flying at 375 miles an hour, the pilot begged the air traffic controller to change his mind—and fast—but it was too late. The response was garbled, and the blip representing the Learjet vanished from the radar screen as the plane slammed into the icy, unyielding 11,502-foot mountain. The impact was so powerful that the wings and tail were sheared from the fuselage. The sudden, violent deceleration hurled the crew, the passengers, and their luggage across the snowswept folds of the mountain, scattering limbs and shredded pieces of clothing in the trees.
The operators of the Learjet service, Jet Avia, Ltd., immediately contacted Sinatra’s attorney, Milton Rudin, who flew from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to tell his most important client that his mother’s plane had disappeared in a turbulent snowstorm. Shaken but bolstered by hope that she would survive, Frank decided to go on with his opening night show as if nothing had happened. Without alluding to the missing plane, the sixty-one-year-old entertainer sang so smoothly and joked so easily that his audience gave him a standing ovation.
When there was no word by midnight, Frank began to lose hope, and when the rescue efforts had to be called off because of snow and driving winds, he canceled the rest of his engagement and returned with his wife to Palm Springs to wait. Frank, Jr., joined him a few hours later, as did Jilly Rizzo and Mickey Rudin.
Early the next day, the weather had improved enough for Civil Air Patrol helicopters to circle the mountain ridge to search for some trace of wreckage, but there was nothing. Hope that Dolly might be alive all but faded, and the vigil in the Sinatra compound became a deathwatch.
The next morning, Frank was so tormented by the image of his mother buried alive under a freezing blanket of snow that he insisted on going up with one of the Air Patrol helicopter pilots, Don Landells, to search for her. Twisted with grief, he boarded the plane and sat in silence, straining to catch a glimpse of anything moving below. The pilot circled for hours, but there was no trace of the jet or of any of its passengers. All that could be seen was the rescue team in bright orange parkas slogging their way through the towering snowdrifts. The longer the helicopter hovered over the mountain, the more hopeless the situation looked. Finally, Frank signaled the pilot to return home. He called the San Bernadino sheriff from his compound to say that he did not want the rescue team to take any unnecessary risks while searching for the crash site.
The next morning, Sunday, January 10, Landells went up again and flew over the estimated site of the crash. This time, he noticed a bit of disturbed snow in a sparsely wooded area. Circling lower,