Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (44 page)

By October the plane had over twenty-nine thousand flight hours and seemed rickety. During its first use on Skynyrd tours, McCreary was again the copilot, under a seasoned pilot named Les Long, who had since quit the company that hired the pilots, Falcon Aviation of Lawrenceville, Georgia. For this tour, the pilot would be McCreary himself; his joint-passing partner, Bill Gary, would be the copilot. The plane had not seen any problems until, on the way in from Miami to Greenville, Ken Peden, a sound technician, reported seeing a six-foot flame shooting from one of the engines en route. Though the plane landed safely, the incident scared him to no end and kept everyone in the Skynyrd party on edge about the aircraft.

The band themselves preferred riding their tour bus, which had snazzy, flashing blue lights and the Skynyrd logo painted onto each side. But it had to be a relief that they would be able to drink or smoke what they wanted and throw punches at whom they wanted in blissful peace. And even Pyle, who has been known to contradict himself, said once that “when we flew into town in that plane it was wonderful because it was just such a cool, old airplane.” Still, just hours before the plane would depart for the next gig, the band was so concerned about a repeat of that flaming engine that they sent Dean Kilpatrick and the tour manager Ron Eckerman, whom Pete Rudge had expressly told to get some answers from the pilots, to find McCreary and Gray. They went to the pair's hotel room, but the two had already departed, leaving a message at the desk that they had gone to Greenville Downtown Airport early to work on the troublesome engine. Gene Odom, also looking for answers, found them on the tarmac tinkering around with the engine.

“What's wrong with the plane?” Odom demanded to know. “That was a helluva trip comin' up here.”

Gray said something about the magneto, a magnet-operated generator, and that they'd called ahead to Baton Rouge to have a mechanic ready to repair it when they arrived.

“
Baton Rouge
?!” Odom said. “That's crazy. Why don't you have him fly here?”

“No reason to,” Gray said. “It's just something we need to fix so the engine will run better.” The fire Peden had seen, McCreary added, “wasn't as bad as it looked. Besides, we can fly the plane on one engine if we had to.”

These explanations themselves were reason enough for alarm. One word from Ronnie and the whole flight would have been bagged. And, according to Alex Hodges, the plane issue had become the fulcrum of a broader range of discontent by the band as it approached this fateful flight.

“I spoke with Ronnie a day before, and he had definitely soured on Rudge, for a lot of things, but the plane was one of 'em. It sort of symbolized to the band that Rudge was doing things on the cheap, and here they were one of the biggest bands in the world. They had fired Alan Walden because they wanted to be like the Rolling Stones, but here they were still being treated like dirty rednecks. And Ronnie told me, ‘We're not happy with Premier Talent.' He said he wanted me to book their next tour. I don't know if he wanted to go back to Alan—probably not, that was a dead issue. But he always thought I was much more on his wavelength and had a better understanding of what Skynyrd was, and he wanted me to go back to booking them—which would have been the first step toward firing Rudge.

“That conversation left me with a very uneasy feeling. They were not a happy bunch, and the plane was like a metaphor for them being trapped in a bad situation. I'm not gonna lie and say I sensed the plane was gonna go down, but I was very uneasy about them gettin' on it, I'll tell you that.”

But if Ronnie ever had a moment of hesitation about getting on, he opted to go ahead, as he always did despite the fact that, as Odom says, “he hated snakes and always hated to fly.”

Van Zant believed in superstitions—witness his frantic overreaction when the Confederate flag hit the floor. Odom recalled when Ronnie once saw an actual black cat creepin' in front of his car and then licked
his index finger and left three Xs on the window. Now, fears aside, he was either putting up a brave front or was too drunk to care when he boarded. Encountering a worried-looking Odom at the door, he told him, “C'mon, let's go. If it's your time to go, it's your time to go.”

After JoJo Billingsley had gone home, she called Allen and said she'd had a dream the plane had crashed, and had woken up “screaming and crying.” Allen, typically, was fearless. But Cassie Gaines almost bailed. She made reservations to take a commercial flight to Baton Rouge before she was eventually persuaded to travel with the band. Dean Kilpatrick, for his part, never had a doubt he would go with them. Ever the good soldier, he had grown like the rest of them into his late twenties. To them he was more than a roadie. One time in Paris, after Artimus was detained by the gendarmes for riding a motorcycle without a helmet, Dean passed himself off as Pyle for a photo shoot, with no one in the French press the wiser. Not completely recovered from his own injuries from crashing the band's van into a Greyhound bus, he was back, boldly leading the roadies onto the plane with not a moment of hesitation.

And so, despite the grumbling about the plane, they filed on one by one: the band, Cassie Gaines and Leslie Hawkins, the roadies, sound and lighting men including Kevin Elson and their new concert sound engineer Paul Welch, Odom, and cameraman Bill Sykes, who was making a documentary of the tour. Always protective of Ronnie, Pyle would say later that Van Zant was “the healthiest, strongest he'd been in a long time” on the day of that flight, though Ronnie was so hung over he could barely see straight.

The plane was overloaded, crammed full of luggage and equipment and sundry mementos the band had gotten in Japan. Again, the pilots saw no problem. For two hours the flight was delayed as they attempted to get the dodgy engine to fire up. Then, at 4:02
PM
, they took off. As they reached twelve thousand feet, below them panned out the landscape that had bred and sustained them, the South of old and new cultures, big cities and backwoods, old plantations and new superhighways.

This land had been built by men like Lacy Van Zant, one look at whom brought to mind Pat Conroy's description, “as Southern as black-eyed peas, scuppernong wine, she-crab soup, Crimson Tide tailgating and a dog with ticks,” people “so relentlessly Southern [they] make me feel that I was born in Minnesota!” Lacy Van Zant's oldest son was
relentlessly a Southern Man, right to the end, but one with some cracks in the veneer of toughness and invincibility. Odom remembers a conversation he'd had with Ronnie a day before, when, letting down his fighter's stance, he'd admitted he had a fear of being booed off the stage.

“He said, ‘I don't know what they see in me, and one day they're gonna wake up.'”

Ronnie had taken his accustomed seat in row one, with Dean seated between him and Rossington. Across the aisle, Leon sat between Steve and Cassie. The skies were, just as they had sung, so blue. The soil and kith and kin of the South lay below them, reassuring as always. It was a good day. Any day in the bank was always a good day.

T
wo hours into the flight, with a half hour until the destination, Ronnie was fast asleep, his face buried in a pillow. A little while later, the band felt they had to address the issue of the plane. Without waiting to get to Baton Rouge, they decided that they would junk the Convair and buy a Learjet like the other big rock acts. That decision made, they felt relief they wouldn't have to go through all this agita again. One more landing and the Convair was gone for good. Feeling better, they began messing around, playing poker and doing some terrible white-boy disco dancing in the aisle. Pyle said there was no booze on board, no pot. “Everybody was basically straight and having a good time”—not that they weren't still feeling the effects of the drinking they had done at the hotel before the flight.

Unbeknownst to the passengers, though, the plane was in trouble. Fuel had been leaking for some time, and the engines now began to sputter. Paul Welch maintained later that he saw the engine trailing fire as on the previous flight. At the time, Pyle happened to be in the cockpit with Allen, watching the sun set against a brilliant orange twilight sky. The pilots didn't seem disturbed but, hearing the engine wheeze, Artimus, whose father had died in a plane crash, knew something was wrong. So did Billy Powell, who soon joined them in the cockpit. Billy would say he heard a no-longer-confident Gray mutter, “Oh my God!” as the right engine cut out. Both pilots, Powell said, “were young and they panicked, so they jettisoned the fuel by accident.”

They may also have pumped too much into the crippled engine, the one with the excess sparking, explaining what Welch saw. In any case, if the pilots were unfazed, they themselves couldn't determine how much was being wasted because the fuel gauge was broken. The only way to estimate what they had left was the highly unreliable, Stone Age way: dropping a dipstick into the tank. After McCreary had done so, Powell said, the pilot seemed to be “clearly in shock. His eyes were bugged out.”

The pilots tried siphoning fuel from the left to the right engine, but apparently they accidentally dumped critical fuel from the plane, leading the left engine to quit. Only moments before, Gray had told Odom, “Everything is under control.” Now, at 6:39
PM
, the pilots radioed the Houston Air Route Traffic Control Center and were cleared to descend to six thousand feet. Three minutes later, Gray told the controller, “We need to get to a airport, the closest airport you've got, sir.” The controller asked the crew if they were in an emergency status.

“Yes, sir,” Gray said, “we're low on fuel and we're just about out of it, we want vectors to McComb, post haste please, sir.”

That meant McComb-Pike County Airport in McComb, Mississippi, eighty miles from Jackson in the southwest quadrant of the state. Given a path there, a few minutes later Gray told the controller, “We are not declaring an emergency, but we do need to get close to McComb as straight and good as [we] can get, sir.” Then, at 6:45, “Center, five victor Mike we're out of fuel.”

Houston replied, “Roger, understand you're out of fuel?”

“I am sorry,” Gray clarified, “it's just an indication of it,” not explaining what, in lieu of a working gauge, that indication was. Seconds later, the controller requested what the plane's altitude was.

“We're at four point five,” said Gray, meaning 4,500 feet. That was the last time anyone on the ground heard from the pilots. Several attempts were made to contact them, and located a weak transmission from an emergency locator transmitter, but there was no response.

In the plane, William Gray finally came into the cabin and made an announcement to the passengers. “We're out of gas—put your heads between your legs and buckle up tight.”

As Rossington later said, “We were just freaked out.” Ashen, the passengers began sitting down and buckling up. But Ronnie was out of it, spread out in the aisle, either unable to sleep in his seat or so hung over
that he had collapsed, or because, as Odom says, he had given him two sleeping pills to help him sleep. Odom would tell later of trying to lift him bodily and dump him in his seat, but that might not have happened. Chris Charlesworth recalled that people on the flight told him Ronnie was “flat out drunk” and lying immobile “in the aisle when the plane went down. No one could move him to a seat, let alone strap him in.”

It seemed everyone on the plane had a different story about what Ronnie was or was not doing as the plane was going down. Pyle even said that, rather than being out cold on the floor, Van Zant had at the first sign of danger walked toward the back of the plane. “[H]e stood right beside me and we shook hands, the old hippie handshake, and I looked into his eyes and he smiled a beautiful smile … and he rolled his eyes like, ‘Oh, shit, here we go.' He had a crimson velour pillow, and he was walking back to the front of the plane, and I thought, ‘Bad idea … the front of the plane's not a good place to be.'”