Down Around Midnight (7 page)

George Parmenter lived to fly, and to see him grounded would have been unthinkable to anyone in the local aviation community. “I cannot imagine George Parmenter as a man who for some reason was unable to fly,” Van Arsdale said. “None of us close to aviation can understand how this accident could happen.”

One of the members of that community was Dr. Grover Farrish, a Hyannis internist and a pilot himself, who served as the Federal Aviation Administration's local aviation medical examiner (AME).

Some four pages of the twenty-five-page accident report are devoted to George Parmenter's medical history. In 1963, suffering from persistent hypertensive cardiovascular disease, he was permanently removed from flight duty as a reserve officer in the Marine Corps. Predisposed to hypoglycemia and suffering from chronic high blood pressure, he was periodically denied FAA medical certificates, those required of a civilian pilot, over the course of the next five years. Not until August 1970, after a physical examination by Grover Farrish, did he receive the second-class medical certificate that again made it legal for him to fly. In 1971, after another examination by Farrish, he was issued a first-class certificate. And for the next seven and a half years, reports the NTSB, first-class certificates were “issued to the captain at 6-month intervals on the basis of physical examinations and cardiovascular evaluations performed by the same AME.” On the application for his last certification, four months before the crash, Parmenter, when asked, listed no medications (his use of any would have required waivers) and stated that he had never been denied an airman's medical certificate. At the time, he had been on daily medication for over a decade for both hypertension and gout—“the AME in Hyannis denied knowledge of either drug”—and according to his autopsy had suffered a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, within the previous five years.

A U.S. Navy pathologist testified at the NTSB hearing held three months after the crash that in view of Parmenter's age and medical history, the pilot should have been found “unfit for flying duty.” The board characterized the “results of repeated evaluations” by Farrish as “equivocal medically.” Farrish did not answer a subpoena to testify. A few years later, Cape Cod Hospital appointed him chief of cardiology. He died in 1994.

Among his fellow Air New England pilots, Parmenter had a reputation for not always flying by the book. A majority of those interviewed told the NTSB that he had “disregarded checklists and crew coordination when they had flown with him.” This is what is meant in the report by “his personal flying habits.”

There is a call-and-response protocol between pilot and copilot required on all instrument landings. It consists of altitude, degree, and airspeed callouts, culminating in a “no contact /go around” exchange if the runway is not in sight. The copilot testified that on approach to Barnstable that night, he made all the required callouts except the “no contact” call and Parmenter did not acknowledge any of them. This is “the lack of crew coordination practices and procedures” mentioned in the report.

It was unlikely that the copilot, with only two months on the job, still on probation, and subject to termination without cause, would engage in corrective counseling with the number-three man in the company. He could have taken control of the airplane at any point, of course, and presumably would have if he had suspected trouble, but he had been flying all day with a superior known rarely to “acknowledge checklist items or other callouts from any first officer,” according to the report, and the lack of such acknowledgment was not an indication that anything was wrong. By the time they hit decision height, “the possibility that [he] could have successfully assumed control of the aircraft [was] extremely remote.” He told the board he never saw the ground before the airplane crashed.

 

 

Wendy Boepple, working at the time as a nurse in Burlington, Vermont, received news of the crash early that Monday morning, informed of the tragedy in a phone call from the emergency room at Cape Cod Hospital. It was her second wedding anniversary. She flew from Burlington to Boston on a Delta Airlines pass, a perk to which she was entitled as the daughter of a Delta pilot, and at Logan Airport made her way to the Air New England counter, only to be told that all of its flights to Hyannis were booked.

“I was very naive,” she told me.

It never occurred to her, in what she views today as her “immaturity,” to exert any of the leverage implicit in the purpose of her trip. Had she simply said who she was and why she was traveling, the airline undoubtedly would have accommodated her. Instead, she ended up taking a bus.

Her two-hour ride to the Cape was made surprisingly memorable by a reunion of sorts. She found herself sitting next to Eleanor Klimm, whom she had known more formally as Mrs. Klimm when the older woman was her fifth-grade teacher at Hyannis West Elementary. The two passengers, getting acquainted, or reacquainted, talked all the way to Hyannis, making the best of a journey that both had reason to wish were unnecessary. Mrs. Klimm, Wendy was saddened to learn, was suffering from cancer, and had traveled to Boston for medical treatment. When she asked why Wendy was making the trip to the Cape, Wendy explained to her fifth-grade teacher what she had not explained to anyone at the Air New England counter, which was everything she knew at the time from the call she'd received from Cape Cod Hospital: that her husband, sometime in the middle of the night, had been admitted through the hospital's emergency room. His name was Paul. He was twenty-five. He was a medical student. He'd been in a plane crash.

“
I
was reading the
New England Journal of Medicine.
” Paul Boepple, since I'd seen him reading that night on the plane, had lost some of his hair, and what remained of it had lost some of its color. His facial index had dropped a few points, but the sharp line of his brow and the severity of his gaze were all the visual evidence I'd have needed to pick him out of a lineup.

Sitting in my living room, wearing shorts and sandals and sipping a beer, he appeared to have lost none of the personal qualities in evidence when I'd first encountered him. He showed the same thoughtful, introspective reserve of the young medical student who during the flight had kept quietly to himself, the same seriousness of purpose that had led me, when the plane was taking off from LaGuardia, to single him out among my fellow passengers as the one grown-up onboard. In outer aspect and demeanor, he was much of what you would expect in a doctor and everything you would want in a pediatrician.

On a Sunday afternoon in June, taking a couple of hours out of a weekend visit to Wendy's mother in Centerville, he and Wendy had driven down to my place. Meeting this way proved easier for them than coordinating time in their schedules at home, and it saved me a trip to Boston, where Paul practices and teaches pediatric endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Wendy works as an emergency room nurse at North Shore Medical Center in Lynn.

Paul had brought with him some newspaper clips and a copy of the accident report. He obviously had kept a file at some point, and it was neater and better organized than mine. Among the news clips he showed me was the wire story that the Associated Press had moved in the early morning hours right after the incident. Headlined “Air Crash Kills Pilot; Woods Slow Rescue” and datelined Yarmouth, Massachusetts, the story had been cut by Wendy's father from the
Kansas City Star.
George Parmenter had not been the only one flying that night. Angus Perry, on Monday morning, in the cockpit of a 727, had been preparing for takeoff from Little Rock, Arkansas, when someone handed him the paper, and there, buried in the twelfth paragraph of the seventeen-paragraph story, he read the name of his good friend George. Leaving the cockpit to telephone home, he returned a few minutes later with the information that his son-in-law had been aboard the plane that Parmenter had been flying.

In an exchange of correspondence before he and I talked, Paul had pointed to “some personal threads of the story that impact my perspective,” conditioning his cooperation with me on knowing more about my “planned coverage of the events.” After I outlined for him what I intended to do, he revealed his wife's connection to Parmenter, explaining that he was thus “sensitive to how the incident is portrayed.” In none of our subsequent conversations did either he or Wendy frame the events of that night in a context that would suggest how difficult a time it must have been for them. But the simple accretion of detail they provided, in its matter-of-fact way, evoked a stark poetic sentiment: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.”

Falling on the eve of the couple's wedding anniversary, the tragedy marked the end of a weekend that had found them flying from New England to New York City, where Paul's father, stricken with colon cancer, was undergoing surgery. From New York, Wendy returned to work in Burlington. Paul returned to Cape Cod. As part of his curriculum at the University of Vermont, Paul was serving an externship on the Cape, attached to a community practice in Hyannis, seeing patients and making rounds with a local primary-care physician—a program for “getting out into the real world”—between his third and fourth years of medical school. He was staying with Wendy's parents in Centerville. Wendy's mother, a nurse who worked as a clinical instructor in the Coronary Care Unit at Cape Cod Hospital, had helped him secure the position, and it was she who was scheduled to meet him at the airport.

The plane crashed on Father's Day.

Paul was admitted to the hospital after being carried out of the woods. Wendy was notified at two A.M. Information was sparse. “The guy who called didn't know anything,” she said.

She was hastening to her husband's bedside when she met Mrs. Klimm on the bus, and throughout her rush to the Cape, she was unaware that there was a fatality associated with the crash he had survived. Nor had she any reason to wonder who had been flying the plane that had almost cost her husband his life.

“I didn't know George had been killed,” she said.

Three days later, at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, the summer parish of the Kennedy family, she joined some five hundred people at Parmenter's memorial service.

“It was a very conflicting place to be,” she told me. “I had conflicting emotions about what happened.” But there was nothing equivocal about her grief. “He was my uncle.”

Parmenter was cremated that day and his ashes released from an airplane over Cape Cod Bay. As his friend Van Arsdale said in his eulogy, “A long, full day in an airplane would seem an appropriate way to end George's life.”

Paul, for his part, didn't know Parmenter personally. “I knew
of
him, but I never met him,” he said.

Wendy remained on the Cape for a week. Three or four days into her stay, Paul was released from the hospital. The injuries he had sustained were clearly more serious than had been apparent to me in the wake of the crash. His collision with the seat back in front of him, in addition to breaking his nose, had broken the bottom of both orbital sockets.

“It was like a two-by-four across the face,” he told me.

I had taken the same two-by-four just above the eye.

A year after the crash, he would have follow-up surgery to correct the damage to his nose, but the blow-out fracture of the orbits, as the injury to the floor of the eye sockets is known, would permanently affect his sight.

“My left eye is sunken a millimeter or two, and I have some double vision.”

The double vision is of minor concern, he said, limited to a very specific positioning of his eyes when lowered. Whether the condition had any practical consequence is a question he shrugs off, but the symptom would seem to have limited his choices when it came to pursuing a specialty. A surgical residency was probably not in the cards. But all that would come much later. Amid the chaos of the crash itself, dwelling on his injuries was a luxury Paul could not afford.

In the silence that enveloped the aircraft at the moment it came to a stop, Paul's faith in the natural order of things went largely unrewarded.

“I was waiting for the voice of authority,” he said.

Mine was clearly insufficient to his needs.

“I was wearing clogs,” he remembered. “I spent the first minute looking for my shoes.”

From the time he was able to find them to the time I was able to crack the door, several minutes passed. And as soon as the door was open, Paul escaped the wreck. He was the second one through. While he was moving away from the plane, Suzanne, climbing out of the underbrush, was coming back aboard. Paul, all the activity behind him now, had the darkness to himself. He stood in the woods alone.

“Once the plane comes to rest, move toward the exit as quickly as possible. Fire and poisonous fumes can quickly fill the cabin, trapping you inside. . . . Get away from the crash site as soon as possible. It's going to become a very lethal environment.
. . .
”

That is the incantation. That, in abbreviated form, extracted here from the remarks of an FAA air-safety investigator, is what the professionals tell you to do. It is the industry-wide protocol, and Paul had followed the ritual precisely, without the help of anyone in authority. He had managed to save himself, honoring without error his obligation to do so. He had every reason to be satisfied with what he had accomplished.

Every reason but one.

Paul was about to solve a mystery, a puzzle that had confounded me since I'd first sat down with Suzanne. In determining who had done what that night, I was confronted with a simple arithmetic problem. Half of it he had just addressed. I had wondered why Suzanne had found herself alone at the front of the cabin once the eldest sister had been removed from the plane. Suzanne and the passenger named Brian had carried the young woman to the door. Carrying that sister off the plane would have required the work of two, and that would have left one other person, one person other than me, onboard the plane with Suzanne. Yet, Suzanne, according to what she told me, had been left to move the youngest girl on her own.