Sad to say, the D.C. police would take a dim view of that.

Most of the team lived in Virginia and would get to the airport before me, whatever route I took. But the plane wouldn't leave without me.

I hate National Airport. It's an affront to everything the NTSB stands for. A few years back, when the news of the Air Florida hitting the 14th Street bridge first came in, a couple of us hoped (but not out loud) we might finally be able to shut it down It didn't turn out that way, but I still hoped.

As it was, National was just too damn convenient. To most Washingtonians, Dulles International might as well be in Dakota. As for Baltimore ...

Even the Board bases its planes at National. We have a few, the biggest being a Lockheed JetStar that can take us anywhere in the continental U.S. without refueling. Normally we take commercial flights, but that doesn't always work. This time it was too early in the morning to find enough seats going west. There was also the possibility, if this really was as big as Gordy said, that a second team would follow us as soon as the sun came up. We might have to treat this as two crashes.

Everybody but George Sheppard was already there by the time I boarded the JetStar. Tom Stanley had been in contact with Gordy Petcher. While I stowed my gear Tom filled me in on the things Petcher either had not known or could not bring himself to tell me when we talked.

No survivors. We didn't have an exact count yet from either airline, but it was sure to be over six hundred dead.

It had happened at five thousand feet. The DC-10 had gone almost straight down. The 747 flew a little, but the end result was the same. The Ten was not far from a major highway; local police and fire units were at the scene. The Pan Am Boeing was up in the hills somewhere. Rescue workers had reached it, but the only word back was that there were no survivors.