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Pan Am Flight 759 originated in Miami on the morning of July 9, stopped in New Orleans, and crashed just after it took off again. It was 1982, the year I was eight going on nine. I searched for “Miami Pan Am crash” and found it right away. Twenty-nine years later, writing about my childhood, I tried to find out the details of the plane crash for the first time. Over time, I recalled few details except that we had left from Orlando instead of Miami, that the Pan Am plane had crashed into houses on the ground just after takeoff, that a wind shear had been blamed, and that a single baby on the ground survived.
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My parents acted as if nothing were amiss, so I just gripped the armrests tight, after reading the emergency-procedures card five times, and didn’t say anything.
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I had a hard knot in my stomach when our Pan Am flight took off from Orlando the next day. And though I waved my hand as high in the air as I could, I was not chosen to stand on the side of the pool and receive a kiss on the cheek from Shamu, his rubbery-looking whale lips pressed against the volunteer’s cheek as she flinched and wrinkled her nose. He swam up close to one side of his pool, splashing us with a cascade of water. We did go to SeaWorld that day, and Shamu did everything the ads promised: He jumped up and caught a fish from his trainer’s hand as the trainer stood on a tall platform. “But I don’t know what’s going to happen to that baby.” My brother stayed quiet, too young to understand. “We’re very lucky,” my mom repeated, eyes intent on me. My parents looked at me, surprised I was listening. I pictured a lone, intact crib in the middle of the charred wreckage, a little baby in pink footie pajamas, squalling. “What about the baby?” I asked desperately. “Miami-we were supposed to be on that flight,” I heard my dad say to my mom in Mandarin. Its destination: Las Vegas, where we would have caught a connection to San Francisco, our home. A baby girl was found alive under all the rubble of the homes. Diagrams of a plane taking off used giant red arrows to show how wind shear had forced the aircraft back down to the ground, into houses. Images of emergency crews among charred, smoking wreckage-unrecognizable as an airplane, were it not for the blue and white Pan Am logo discernible on a broken piece of the tail-filled the screen. I took a deep breath, to muster the courage to ask Mom and Dad.īut they were staring at the television news, murmuring to each other. “Are we really going to see Shamu?” my brother whispered to me. The next morning, Kelley and I were extra quiet as we got ready. We drove from Miami to Orlando on the day of our originally scheduled flight and spent the night there. From the phone in our Miami hotel room, Dad extended our car rental and changed our outbound flight from Miami to another Pan Am flight a couple of days later out of Orlando. Kelley kept quiet, too, as if we were holding our collective breath. I didn’t want to openly celebrate or thank him, for fear that I might break the spell. It was unusual for my strong-willed, mercurial father to change his plans based on our whims. Kelley and I looked at each other in disbelief.
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“It wouldn’t hurt to stay through the weekend,” he said to Mom. Uncharacteristically, my father relented. I enlisted my five-year-old brother, Kelley, into the effort, and soon we were whining a daily mantra: “We want to go to Seeeea World! We want to see Shamuuu!” But as I watched the friendly looking killer whale jump up to grab fish from his trainer’s hands and slide onto a ramp, wagging his tail as members of the audience petted his large, slick head, I knew I had to go. We were supposed to drive back up to Miami by the end of the week, drop off our rental car, and leave on a Pan Am flight on Friday, July 9.īut billboards and local television along the way had relentlessly advertised Shamu and SeaWorld in Orlando, which we had skipped in favor of Disney World. In five days, we had traveled from Disney World in Orlando to the beaches of Miami to Key West, where all four of us-my father, my mother, my brother, and I-posed for a snapshot in front of a sign proclaiming that we were at the southernmost point in the United States. My father had taken us along on a business trip to Florida that summer, and we had stayed on through the Fourth of July weekend, driving a rental car down the length of the state.