Survivors Remember Crash Of Jetliner In Portland In '78

PORTLAND - Each year, on the same day, at the same hour, Tom Grove returns to the spot where United Flight 173 slammed to the earth and tore through a grove of fir trees.

"I look for that street sign, 157th and Burnside," Grove said. ". . . There's a whole set of apartments out there now. It destroys the feeling I had.

"I'm looking for a field, an empty field . . . so I can put the plane in that field and remember."

The plane ran out of fuel as it approached Portland International Airport on Dec. 28, 1978. Ten of the 189 people aboard were killed. It was a miracle so many survived, rescuers said.

Tonight, 150 survivors are expected to meet in a Portland church for an anniversary that others might find hard to understand.

It was the end of the holiday, and travelers were coming home from Christmas. The Denver airport was packed. United Airlines Capt. Malburn McBroom was making his 13th trip to Portland that month, with his friend Flight Engineer Forrest "Frosty" Mendenhall and First Officer Roderick Beebe.

The Kelly family was lucky to make the flight: a travel agent had mistakenly booked the threesome to Seattle. Jerry Kelly, his wife, Cheryl, and their 2-year-old son, Ryan, wound up in the rear smoking section.

Gaylene Carson was in first class, taking her husband and 7-month-old daughter, Kimberly, to a funeral. Across the aisle, 3-year-old Elisabeth Andor sat with her family.

Grove, a student at Western Baptist Seminary, almost missed the flight but nabbed the last seat - a window near the wing.

The flight was quiet for 2 1/2 hours. As the plane descended, Grove could see the lights of Portland beginning to glow beneath him.

Then, about three minutes before the plane was scheduled to land, a loud thump sounded from the bottom of the plane.

Passengers later learned that a rust-corroded rod let the right landing gear fall free, while the left extended smoothly. The rapid, one-sided drop rocked the plane and short-circuited lights on the instrument panel.

Without those lights, the crew had no idea if the wheels were down. They called off their descent at 5,000 feet, telling Portland controllers that they needed time to figure out what to do. For the next hour, they steered the plane in wide triangles over the city.

Finally, the flight attendants began rearranging the cabin: strong men near the emergency doors, an off-duty pilot at the rear, babies on the floor next to cabin partitions so they wouldn't be thrown by the impact when the plane landed.

At the rear of the plane, Jerry and Cheryl Kelly wouldn't part with Ryan.

In first class, Carson wrapped Kimberly in a jacket and a beanie cap. She fastened the strap under the baby's chin, laid her on the floor and started tickling her.

McBroom asked Mendenhall to figure another 15 minutes until landing. "Fifteen minutes is gonna really run us low on fuel here," the engineer replied.

At 6:06, when the flight attendant opened the cockpit to say the passengers were ready, Engine No. 4 began to sputter. At 6:13 p.m., eight miles from the airport, all the engines quit.

McBroom looked at Interstate 84, a chain of lights from the evening rush hour. The adjacent Columbia River was out; even if he could make it, people would drown.

The only hope was to steer for the small dark patch before him.

"It was black. I couldn't see city lights or anything," Grove said. "There was this weird feeling of quietness. In a sense, it was peaceful."

First the plane clipped the trees, then smashed a vacant house just south of Burnside.

"I didn't have any directional control," McBroom said. "I saw this large tree coming through the co-pilot's side window. It cut through the fuselage. It cut Frosty and killed him."

Grove felt his legs and back contort. He heard the aluminum screech as trees tore off the wing.

The force pulled Ryan Kelly from his mother's grip, and she panicked, grabbing for him. Jerry Kelly held onto Ryan's leg. He doesn't remember how. "I think I blacked out," he said.

The plane's nose and main landing gear dug into an embankment, and the plane came to rest atop a shed 1,275 feet from where it had clipped the first tree.

When Jerry Kelly came to, he had his son. He had his wife. "We're here," he thought. "We've made it."

It was 6:14 p.m.

Neighbors raced to the plane and found Gaylene Carson, barely moving under a row of overturned seats, asking for her husband and child.

Paramedics later found Gaylene's husband, Danny Cercone, with a gash in his scalp. Their baby, Kimberly, was plucked from a blackberry bush, essentially unharmed.

At the rear of the plane, the Kellys found no slide - only branches and blackness. "It was no option," Cheryl Kelly said. "You had to jump into the night, or who knew what would happen."

After helping to evacuate the rear of the plane, off-duty pilot T.D. Garrett went to the front of the plane and discovered the wreckage that had been the first five rows. Underneath, there were more passengers.

He couldn't find the cockpit. The top of the plane's nose had been ripped away. The floor, with the crew seats, had twisted upside down and backward. That's where McBroom found himself dangling from his seat belt, cut and bleeding.

Grove jumped out an exit and, walking on what he thought was the wing, helped others to safety. When they were gone, he remembered his briefcase and went back in. "I could see the front of the plane, and there was nothing there."

He jumped back out on what he now realized was the roof of the smashed shed, climbed down and walked to the intersection.

"I'll never forget looking at that street sign," he said. "157th and Burnside? What am I doing out here?"

A month after the crash, he pulled his car off the road to weep. Six years ago, the residual feelings motivated him to leave the ministry and became a teacher.

"I wanted to make an impact on people's lives," he said.

Cheryl Kelly said their family had nightmares for a few months, but as the months and years passed, the story faded into family lore.

"Even something like that - a brush with death, as it were - doesn't stay with you year after year," Kelly said.

Elisabeth Andor, the 3-year-old riding with her family in first class, has no memory of that night, of her parents or her two little sisters, who all died that night when trees pierced the front of the plane.

"They are really kind of like strangers," said Andor, now 23.

She believes she was saved for a reason: to help others.

"I know my parents and my sisters were good people," she said. "I will never make sense to me why He chose them."

A few weeks after McBroom got home, he thought about killing himself.

"But I knew it wouldn't make any difference," he said. "And I couldn't do it to my family."

McBroom, who had lost his pilot's rating as a result of the crash, returned to work at United's flight-training center in Denver, but after a few months took early retirement and started selling real estate.

"It all comes back very vivid . . . The fact that I lost some people and destroyed the airplane - it's painful."

He said it is that sense of failure that brings him to the reunion, to help make things better if he can. "If they feel the need to meet me, and it can help bring closure, then I will," he said.

Aimee Ford Conner, who was 17 at the time of the crash, organized the reunion "because it's the right thing to do," she said. "People have a need to talk about it."

She said she doesn't have a conscious memory of the crash. Yet her nightmares about flying don't go away.

Once a year, on Dec. 28, she pulls out the laminated newspaper clippings. She gathers family and friends.

"I tell the story to remember what it was like," she said. "I remember how glad I am to be alive."