Survivors Tell of Smoke, Fire, Fear of Death

Passenger Chul Hong was in seat 7F, flying into Los Angeles from Columbus, Ohio. He would recall later that the landing of the USAir Boeing 737 was smooth, that he felt “just a little bump.”

“Then I heard a noise--I thought it was just the tires blowing off,” said Hong, a 62-year-old physician from Canton, Ohio. “And then I see the flames, and everybody started screaming their heads off. I thought I was going to die.”

Leaping through an exit just behind his seat, Hong dropped to the Tarmac and then sprinted from the plane, fearing it might explode at any time. After 100 yards, the slight, bespectacled man glanced back. He saw fire engines, paramedics and other vehicles streaming toward the scene.

And he saw the plane, engulfed in flames.

“Thanks to the Lord,” said Hong, who is relocating to Los Angeles and had come west Friday to shop for a home. “I could be burned to death.”

Wrapped in thin, blue blankets, looking weary and shellshocked, survivors of ill-fated USAir Flight 1493, which originated in Syracuse, N. Y., told a tale of horror Friday as they trickled from the airline lounge where they were taken immediately after the crash.

Leaning heavily on the shoulders of relatives there to greet them, walking tentatively, as if unsure of their legs, the passengers said there was no warning before a bang shook the twin-engine Boeing 737 and flames licked the plane’s tiny windows.

They described a rapid, sometimes chaotic flight from the burning wreckage, which was quickly filled with black smoke. They squeezed through doors and windows. Some rode down slides, others leaped from wings. The injured were scattered everywhere, on the Tarmac, in the airplane aisles, even on a bus that eventually would come to take them to the terminal.

Many survivors said some of their first thoughts were of terrorism, a product of war-related anxiety.

“I was thinking about it before I flew,” said Laurie Bell, 28, a furniture company employee from Columbus, who was traveling with her boyfriend, Doug Folden.

Clutching a blanket around her several hours after the crash, Bell said she was reaching under her seat for her purse when she suddenly felt a jolt and “saw fire, all over the place. The place just filled up with smoke.

“I was just thinking that I was only going to have two breaths left,” said Bell, who was later to go to a hospital Friday night to have her lungs examined. “I thought it was over. I heard Doug calling my name, and I reached out my hands, and he pulled me, and I saw the light, and I said, ‘Thank God. I’m going to get to breathe again.’ ”

Folden recalled that the exit had been jammed with fleeing passengers.

“I had to yank out four or five people before she heard me,” he said.

“I am just glad to be alive,” Bell added.

Laurel Bravo and her cousin, Alysse Rosewater, had flown west for a vacation, a respite from the brutal Ohio winter. It had been a long, draining flight from Columbus, and the twinkling lights of Los Angeles were an inviting beacon.

All that changed when the plane touched down.

At first, they said, it felt like little more than a rough landing. Then the row in front of the women vanished.

“The row ahead of us just disappeared,” recalled Bravo, 24, of Cleveland. “The seats all went flying downward. I thought I was going to die.”

Her cousin remembered it this way:

“We . . . felt an immediate hit,” said Rosewater, 22, of Cincinnati. “We first thought it was a small plane that we had hit. There was a lot of smoke, and we were trying to run off the plane, but people were screaming all over the place.”

As she spoke, long after the crash, her eyes were still red from the smoke, her clothes covered with soot.

Scott Vaughan, 26, was reading his newspaper when the plane set down.

“We landed on the runway, the plane went down and the left engine caught on fire,” Vaughan, of Agoura Hills, said as he walked from the terminal two hours after the crash.

Leaning heavily on the shoulder of his girlfriend, his face drawn and pale, Vaughan recounted the ensuing panic:

There were “flames everywhere, fire everywhere, smoke inside,” he said in a quavering voice. “People were screaming, just trying to get out.”

Fighting to collect his wits, Vaughan spotted the only exit that appeared to be open and leaped out, pulling seven or eight other passengers with him.

“There was only one exit,” he said, “only one. It was all a blur.”

Martin Strasen, 60, a Manhattan Beach businessman who had gone to Columbus to teach a sales seminar, escaped the crash with only a smudge on his khaki trousers. He was seated by the window on the left side of the plane.

“By the first jolt, we already knew something was wrong,” Strasen said. “We knew the plane was either going to crash-land or pull the gears up or crash in a field.”

Flames leaped up around Strasen, and he said he was expecting to hear an explosion. But no explosion occurred, perhaps, he speculated, because little fuel remained after the long flight.

“People were pushing, pushing, pushing through the door,” Strasen said. “People were saying, ‘Stay calm.’ But it was hard to stay calm when the plane was on fire.”

Strasen’s wife, Leann, was waiting anxiously for an hour with no word of his fate. Finally, about 7 p.m., a Los Angeles police officer emerged from the USAir Club, where the survivors were being held, and called her name.

“I jumped up,” Leann Strasen said, “and he said, ‘He’s OK.’ ”

Several survivors said the crew did a good job of evacuating passengers and that the emergency exit chutes opened promptly.

Larry Josephson, a member of the Navy, was en route to the China Lake Weapons Testing Center in the Mojave Desert. Unlike his fellow passengers, Josephson seemed unfazed by the crash and said he planned to take another flight to the desert--on SkyWest.

“I still think it’s safer than driving,” he said.

Times staff writers Andrea Ford, Victor Merina, Richard A. Serrano and Elaine Woo contributed to this report.