the story behind “Mighty” — and SOME mighty deeds of God!

√  MY FIRST HAND ACCOUNT

On my way home from Israel the evening of April 4, 1979 (visiting my parents and younger siblings), I sat in window seat 21A — the smoking section back then — of TWA flight #841 from New York to Minneapolis, one of 82 passengers and seven crew members. We were cruising at 39,000 feet on a rather smooth flight; seat belt signs had been turned off. Flight attendants had cleared the evening meal. At about 9:30 that evening while in the vicinity over Saginaw, Michigan, the plane, a 14-year old Boeing 727-100, barrel-rolled one and a half times (a wing over wing right-hand roll).

Midway through the second roll (in the belly-up position), our airplane nosed down 60 degrees and began accelerating toward the earth at an average decent of about 45,000 feet per minute (the decent rate in the final moments apparently reached 76,000 feet per minute). At speeds believed to exceed 650 miles per hour, the aircraft broke the sound barrier — the first time in history a commercial airliner (other than the Concorde) had done so. Nothing the three-man cockpit crew frantically tried to do was working; they simply couldn’t slow us down or get the nose up to regain our tri-jet’s flight characteristics. In a last-ditch effort, Captain Hoot Gibson noticed First Officer Scott Kennedy’s left hand on the landing gear lever and shouted something like, “yes, drop the gear!” to see whether that action would create enough drag to help slow down our still-diving, accelerating plane. Somewhere around 5,000 feet above ground, the welcomed rush of turbulence and drag created by the opening gear finally allowed the airplane’s elevator to push the tail down, pitching the nose up. Flight recording instruments later revealed we pulled 5.5 g’s (gravity forces) coming out of the dive. One report claimed we were just two seconds away from impact. Except for the grace, mercies and another mighty deed of Almighty God that night, it would have been an imbedding explosion, a fiery, life-instantly-ending-as-I-knew-it crash. 

All 89 of us had just survived the longest recorded dive by a commercial jetliner in history in which the plane didn’t hit the ground. But it wasn’t over yet. Twenty pensive minutes later we were circling the Detroit airport. Other airplane traffic had already been cleared. Only the fire trucks and ambulances sat waiting for us, the eerie blood-colored glow of their heart-thumping emergency lights beckoning us to the grave yet one more time that night. “Upon impact…” were the very words a crew member used to begin training us for our emergency ‘landing’ in Detroit (how does ‘impact’ correlate to a ‘landing’?).

The number seven slat had torn off at some point during our ordeal. Now the airplane (without that slat) was trying to roll to the left. To keep us from a left-hand roll on his runway approach, Captain Gibson strained hard with full right aileron and rudder, and with full right trim. To maintain the airplane’s lift in those same final few seconds (without the use of flaps), he touched down at a ground speed 40% faster than normal — on landing gear only the cockpit and ground crews were not convinced would hold.

I have never seen death in another living person’s face before. But in those final few moments of preparation for our emergency landing, I saw death in the face and eyes of one of the flight attendants who — still on the clock (a paycheck I’m sure she thought she’d never collect) — went through her cabin duties, handing out blankets and pillows to each passenger to ‘soften’ the blow of the forthcoming impact. She was lifeless, emotionless as she mechanically performed the duties required in TWA’s emergency manual she thought she’d never really have to use. We had to get rid of our shoes, pull pens and sharp objects from our pockets (preparation to use the evacuation slides). We even had to get rid of neck ties. 

Then on final approach the closing instructions came to us something like this: “Clasp your hands behind your head, and put your head down, now…”, and in the brief seconds it took me to comply, I ‘saw’ the events of my life, the hopes and dreams I still had, and the family I loved and didn’t want to leave — it all swept through me in the blink of an eye. Inside my soul and spirit I bid good-bye to the light of my earthly life and pleaded simply with God not to have to fight my way through flaming jet fuel and its monstrous, hellish effects. In the awesome eternity of that brief moment, I felt the actual spiritual presence of God’s arms wrapping themselves around me. His inaudible voice instantly placed a crystal clear understanding in the ears of my heart that simply said, “You will be alright.” I knew then for certain (with resolute, absolute certainty) that I would either immediately be with God in heaven — or that I would walk away from the plane unharmed. God didn’t reveal which one, but instead allowed me to taste the sweet victory, the savory “peace of God, which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Such peace cannot be manufactured when facing your own death. It comes only from God. It comes only from trusting Him totally.

Three years later, CBS Television got ahold of all the cockpit crew, all but one of the cabin crew, and 39 of the of the 82 passengers. They spent untold hours interviewing each one of us. After they scripted the entire event from the passengers’ and crew members’ first-hand accounts, and from other official accounts, they flew us all to Hollywood, California. A limousine driver met my incoming flight, and took me to the studios where all the airplane cutaway shots and luggage counter check-in shots were filmed. We each got our scripts and we each portrayed our actual selves as CBS filmed their one-hour Peabody Award-winning investigative documentary, The Plane That Fell From the Sky.

Most of those three days of filming were spent sitting around the studio waiting for our few minutes in front of the lights. That gave us ample time to personally talk with fellow passengers and our heroic flight crew. Although it had been nearly four years since our 35,000-foot drop out of the sky, each of us instantly bonded to one another. None of us had to explain how we felt during that nosedive and emergency landing in Detroit. For those of us who did explain, we had attentive ears, fully focused; and we understood each other completely, intuitively. We’d been there together. We had survived together. We were like lost friends finally getting back for a reunion — even though most of us hadn’t spent any time whatsoever getting to know each other since that ominous April evening (which God turned into my second salvation).