Moonshadow: An ancient god who is said to ride into battle on a black dragon, attacking without mercy, killing all.
—Urban Dictionary
Gathered together on the airsteps of Sabena’s Boeing 707, the eighteen members of the United States world figure skating team are ready to depart. Laurence, out in front, her smile caught in the apex of “cheese.” She holds the association’s sign in her right hand, her skate bags in the left, her feet in black pumps placed in dancers’ third position. Just behind her, the rest of the Boston contingent, her big sister—Little Maribel—and her partner Dudley, Greg and Bradley, the other pairs and dancers all the way up to the open door where two crew members wait to welcome them aboard. Teenagers, for the most part, some still in party mode from recent wins at Nationals and North Americans, everyone in winter coats against the chill of the February night. That photo, and one other of just the Boston skaters at Nationals two weeks earlier—the teammates I’d trained with for the past nine years—are still in my office today.
As the group turns to board, Captain Lambrechts and Jean Roy, former Royal Belgian Airforce pilots, are finishing the preflight checks in the cockpit. A few minutes later, happy chatter in the aisles, followed by the popping and slamming of the overhead luggage bins, as the skaters stash boots and costumes—critical items that can’t be chanced to loss.
Take-off from Idlewild would have been sometime after eight-thirty p.m. EST—hard to be precise, because in the course of numerous moves, I’ve misplaced the ticket for Flight 548. But close enough, as the seven-and-a-half-hour flight was scheduled to land in Brussels at 10:05 a.m. CET. A steady climb into the starfilled night to cruising altitude, then supper—perhaps stoemp with sausage, croquettes, or boulettes with frites, Appelflap or Mattentaart for dessert—likely a culinary adventure for a group raised on American fare. Probably chitchat about Laurence gracing the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated, as they crossed the eastern Atlantic, before trying to catch a few hours of sleep, in anticipation of the upcoming battle at the world championships.
By all accounts, an uneventful transatlantic flight, except perhaps for the total eclipse of the sun in its final hours. Said to bring “rapid unexpected changes, time bending, pivot points, and transformation,” a total solar eclipse occurs when a new moon comes between the sun and earth, casting its umbra, the dark center portion of its full shadow, on the earth. It’s one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights, especially when viewed at 33,000 feet, the dark sky around the eclipsed sun, the horizon bathed in a yellow-orange glow. I would have enjoyed a front row seat, had the day before my private school not issued an ultimatum: go with the world team and don’t come back here.
According to newspaper reports, Captain Lambrechts drew his passengers’ attention to the eclipse, Saros number 120. I’d imagined they saw all five of its phases from the first moment when the moon takes a bite out of the sun to when it covers its entire disc and the solar corona, known as the diamond ring, appears for an instant, its temperatures reaching over 1.8 million°F. On this Valentine’s eve, perhaps Little Maribel had caught a glimpse of that ring of fire and thought of the ring Dudley had just given her, the one she’d left at home, their engagement not yet announced. More likely, the ephemeral ring had only been a preview of the heat to come.
It disappears when the sun moves out from under the moon’s shadow, replaced by fleeting signs unique to total eclipses: Baily’s beads, little dots of light at the moon’s edge, and shadow bands, light and dark stripes that might have danced through the cabin, a kind of chiaroscuro, masking and illuminating their faces, before the moon moves away and the halo of the sun’s chromosphere comes into view. Shorter lived than even our skating performances, our moments of fame, these signs, on completion, magically reappear in reverse order. Would the passengers have marveled at this too, life, for the most part, irreversible? Following the signs, totality, when only the sun’s corona is visible, the sky going dark, the temperature dropping, and the moon finally leaving the sun’s disc. Laurence would have made a poem of it. At one time, I tried to equate the eclipse stages to the dark and light of grief, but failed.
The scientist part of me that deals in facts and figures is reluctant to trust metaphor, often waging war with my imaginative self. Wanting to know what was seen when, I insisted on checking flight and eclipse paths, tables of eclipse magnitude and duration at various locations, an emotionally easier metric than time estimations of light sliding into darkness.
The usual flight path from New York to Brussels passes over Dublin, south to London, and across the Channel. The map of the February 15, 1961 eclipse shows it starting on the eastern shores of Ireland and continuing across Asia, its path of totality, however, several hundred miles to the south of the Sabena flight path, suggesting the passengers and crew of Flight 548 were not in the umbra, the moon’s inner shadow, but in the penumbra, its outer shadow, where only a partial eclipse could be seen. Despite the fact that at certain locations, the eclipse was almost total, achieving a magnitude of greater than 0.9, it was disappointment to learn, an error that supported my inclination to rely on charts, tables, and calculations.
According to flight times, three to four minutes before the local sunrise, around 7:40 Irish time, the Boeing 707 would have passed over Dublin into what has been described as “counterfeit twilight,” light and shadow barely visible, the eclipse already underway. Cabin lights probably required to serve and clean up breakfast, most likely of yogurt and fruit, bread with Nutella, coffee, a Belgian chocolate to be savored after arrival. Laurence and Greg would have eaten theirs right away, Bradley, likely saving his for the next flight. Fifteen minutes later over London—an hour and five minutes of flight time remaining, given the hour difference between the UK and Belgium—they’d caught the eclipse close to its maximum and continued in its shadow to their final destination. The hand of God passing over them, someone later said.
The eclipse table indicated the show was just ending as Captain Lambrechts was on a long final approach to Zaventem airport’s runway 20, landing gear and flaps down, when he was forced to cancel it. By one account, a small plane had yet to clear the runway, by another, a Caravelle jet taking off. No one knew for sure, as he’d stopped communicating with the tower. One witness on the ground heard strange rumblings, like thunder in the air, atypical for an approaching plane. A farmer, working an adjacent endive field, reported passengers waving.
At nine hundred feet, Lambrechts increased power and retracted the landing gear, battling with his controls, the sky becoming as slippery as an ice surface on which he could find no footing. Circling the airport a second time, he breasted the fields at five hundred feet, planning to land on the adjoining runway 25, before again aborting the attempt, wrapping his giant bird into an almost vertical bank. Passengers on their ear, those at the downside window with a jumbled perspective of the Berg houses below, as the tower sounded the emergency alarm, rolling out fire trucks and ambulances onto the landing strip, while Lambrechts
completed his third 360 degree turn. At 10:05 a.m., some three miles short of the runway, he climbed to 1500 feet, continually increasing his angle of attack, way past where vortices may form above the wings, rendering them incapable of supporting flight, to ninety degrees, at which point he leveled his wings, abruptly pitched up, stalled, and spiraled into a nosedive.
When a plane goes into a steep bank, spiral, or deep dive, a large G-force, calculated by dividing the rate of deceleration by the gravitational acceleration (32 ft/sec), is placed on the body. Deceleration and acceleration in a kind of tug of war. In this case, determining the former requires knowing the speed entering and exiting those final turns, which I do not. What I do know, from my brief piloting time, is that as the bank angle approaches ninety degrees—passengers riding a horizontal roller coaster—the G-force increases by a hundred percent, possibly exceeding four. Such a force drains blood from the brain, leading to loss of vision, sense of place, even awareness of what is happening, and probable blackout within five to ten seconds. Wanting to remember them waving the moment before, I delay estimating how much time they might have been in this state. In an effort to keep the New England stiff upper lip, I look instead at the data from the 6-G Boeing 707 luggage bin test, trying not to see the overhead bins opening during the nose up and down, skates and costumes with sequins glittering like Baily’s beads flying out of carry-ons and whirling around the cabin.
Saint-Exupéry tells us that “horror is something invented after the fact, when one is recreating the experience over again in memory.” The passengers had no time for that. When the brain senses something terrible is about to happen, it takes things in faster to make decisions, all the while slowing the memory packing, because there is so much to remember before that pivotal moment when time bends and bodies, hurtling towards
the earth, heads between knees, prepare for transformation. If, in this instance, imagination trumps mathematics, I can visualize their final glimpse as, not their last win, but rather the sun moving out from the earth’s shadow and, in the process, I can postpone determining the free fall time from the top of the dive to eternity at the marshy end of the field
√ 2h/g = 2.1500 ft./32.2 ft/sec = 9.65 seconds.