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By Root 1474 0

to sink. It slipped underwater and kept drifting downward for what seemed like a very long time, until it finally settled on the bottom of the river. While this was happening, Stiley made a checklist in his head. He had much to do. First, he needed to free his left leg, which was horribly broken and pinned in the wreckage. He also had to unbuckle his seat belt. Then he had to help Felch. Like many of the survivors in this book, his military training had taught him to always make a plan. It probably saved his life. “There is a tremendous benefit to having that training,” he says. “You don’t sit there wondering what to do. You do it.”

Once the plane stopped falling, Stiley started working on the checklist. He wrenched his leg free, unbuckled his belt, and started to help Felch. He had to break her foot to get it free. Then the two of them swam over the other seats, past the college kids they had been chatting with on the runway. They couldn’t stop to help anyone else. They’d been underwater for too long. Their lungs were throbbing. They kept swimming, clutching each other’s hand, and groping through the black water. Finally they broke through to the surface. As they sucked in the twenty-four-degree air, they saw the tail section of their plane sticking out of the water about ten yards away. It was the only thing to hold on to. They helped each other swim toward it. Then they saw Kelly Duncan, a twenty-two-year-old flight attendant, and the only member of the crew to survive. She came over to hold on to the tail too. Then Priscilla Tirado surfaced, screaming. “Where is my baby? Does anyone see my baby?” In less than five minutes, she had lost her two-month-old infant and her husband forever. Stiley swam over to Tirado and floated her over to the little group of survivors. She pulled so hard on his tie she almost choked him to death, he remembers.

Snow fell intermittently. The drops of water on Stiley’s eyelashes froze into tiny icicles. Both of his legs were broken, as was one arm. All of the passengers were seriously injured. Stiley found a life vest floating in the water, but he couldn’t open its plastic packaging because his hands were so cold. Finally Duncan ripped it open with her teeth. They put it on Felch, and Duncan pulled the inflation cord. Despite her injuries and her relative inexperience, Duncan performed masterfully that day, just as she had been trained to do.

By now, quite a crowd had gathered on the bridge above. They were staring down at the little band of survivors. Some dangled pieces of rope. But Stiley didn’t think he could make it over to the bridge, especially not while dragging Felch. And he knew he couldn’t make it to the riverbank, which was much farther away. So he stayed where he was, clinging to the steel fragments of airplane. He remembers looking up at the crowd at some point and seeing cameras staring back at him.

Stiley checked his watch to see how long they’d been in the water. Ten minutes. He remembered from his Navy training that people tend to go into cardiac arrest after about twenty minutes in extremely cold water. He tried to move the parts of his body that weren’t broken, to generate heat. Finally, Stiley saw flashing red lights. Rescue workers raced down the riverbank with their gear. “Oh, they’re here! Thank God,” Stiley thought. “They showed up just like they were supposed to.” But then he watched as the rescue workers ran to the water’s edge and came to a stop. There was nothing they could do. “They became spectators like everyone else.”

Until that moment, Stiley had been trying to reassure the other survivors. One man, who was pinned into his seat next to the tail, had been mumbling repeatedly, “I’m not going to make it out of here.” Stiley had countered such talk with relentless optimism. He encouraged everyone who could move to try to do small exercises to stave off hypothermia. But now, watching the rescue workers watch them, he felt an emptiness open up in his chest. “I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I survive an airplane crash and I’m going to sit out here and freeze to death