Above her, Capt. Yitzhak Fuchs, the 60-year-old pilot of an El Al 747-200, had just guided his Boeing jumbo-jet freighter out of Schiphol Airport into the cool, clear sky for a routine trip to Israel. Six minutes into the flight, at 6:28 P.M., the inner right-wing engine of the giant, four-engine cargo plane—loaded with 114 tons of mostly textiles and electronics goods, as well as 80 tons of fuel—burst into flames. He radioed a Mayday distress signal, then circled as he dumped fuel over a lake to lighten the load for an emergency landing. As one engine broke loose and the hydraulic controls failed, he and his crew must have known they were doomed. Help-less to avert catastrophe, the pilot transmitted his last words: "Going down! Going down!"
While Natalia was still in her bedroom in her family's 1lth-floor apartment, she saw the 747 passing perilously close overhead, roaring and tilting to one side as it hurtled toward the other buildings. "Every day we hear planes flying low over the place," she says, "but this was a lot lower. The television went out and the windows and doors shook. I thought it might be a bomb. It was only a meter from our roof. The moment the nose hit the building, what an explosion! It was terrible to see. The wings of the plane went into the rooms of people on the 9th and 10th floors. Then we heard people screaming."
Derk Klÿn Velderman, 63, remembers looking up from his reading. "The plane was flying so, so fast, and the noise was so intense that I ducked down as a reflex," he says. "I saw the flames and the terrific ball of fire. Then there was silence. I looked out from my balcony and saw the wreck of the plane and the apartments burning."
The tremendous impact had blown a huge hole in the two adjoining buildings that the 747 struck, demolishing dozens of apartments. The plane itself had instantly exploded, spreading flames outward from the breach. One man who managed to escape the inferno later told a reporter, "I opened my door to step into the corridor and found that the corridor was not there. One side of the building had been completely blown away. I could see the sky from where the corridor should have been. Several bodies, obviously people who had jumped from higher floors, just went by as I stood and watched."
Marco Larof, another witness, added, "We saw people jumping to their deaths before our eyes, and one sight I will never forget—a woman screaming on the sixth floor of the burning building. First, she threw a young child from the balcony, then with her clothes on fire she jumped herself. There was nothing we could do. We felt so totally helpless. They knew they were going to die in the flames or die by jumping from the window. As I watched, I just fell helpless and cold."
As ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency-service vehicles arrived to battle the flames and aid the injured, Gerrel Liesdek, 23, an audiovisual adviser who lives near the complex, volunteered to comfort survivors at a nearby crisis center. (Authorities who are investigating the cause of the crash believe that it killed about 250 persons, mostly poor immigrants from Africa and South American Caribbean areas, who lived in the housing complex, as well as Captain Fuchs, his two crewmen and one woman passenger aboard the plane.) Liesdek says that by chance he had stayed at his girlfriend's place to videotape a sports program instead of joining his friends at a social center in the basement of a building where disaster had struck. "Usually I would be there having a beer," he says, eyes brimming with tears as he tries lo make sense of it all. "But this time I just didn't go. The guys I usually watch sports with, I haven't seen them. None of them."
RON ARIAS
LIZ CORCORAN and LAURA HEALY SANDERSON in Amsterdam
- Contributors:
- Liz Corcoran,
- Laura Healy Sanderson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
