Reba: My Story (36 page)

So Narvel told Jim to have the pilots fly the Sabreliner and the Hawker over to nearby Brown Field. It had no curfew, and the band members could take their time getting to their planes after the concert.

We did our show, but when it was over, Jim heard my voice still singing “Sunday Kind of Love.” He realized that
someone had made a videotape recording, which was forbidden by our contract with the promoter, and so Narvel sent Jim to get that tape. It amounted to the last recording of the last show I ever did with that band.

The band did not play on “Sweet Dreams,” my encore song. I always sang it a cappella. Instead they went to their rooms to pack up, and because of the change in airports, many had the time to call home and to take showers before heading out.

After the show, Jim walked Narvel and me back to our suite. The three of us stood on a twenty-foot-long balcony overlooking the Pacific. The first hint of spring was in the air, and we laughed in the ocean breeze that swept over our faces.

That’s when Narvel told Jim to plan a party for the band, crew, and us when we played the same hotel the following week. We all said our good-byes.

N
ARVEL WAS WATCHING TELEVISION AND I WAS ASLEEP WHEN I
was jolted awake by a ringing telephone. “Who would be calling at this time of night?” I wondered. For an instant, I thought an enthusiastic fan had gotten my room number or that it was a wrong number. But it was Roger Woolsey, our pilot.

“Can you come to my room?” Roger asked Narvel. “I think something bad has happened.”

“I’ll be right there,” I heard my husband say, and he hung up.

He dressed quickly while I asked questions he couldn’t answer. I sat upright in bed. I wouldn’t lie down again until the next night at my home in Tennessee.

Later, Narvel would describe Roger as being white as a sheet when he walked into his room. “I watched everybody get on both planes,” Roger said to Narvel. “Both planes taxied to the end of the runway and I got in my car to come back to the hotel. I looked in my rearview mirror
and I saw this huge ball of fire. And I don’t know if it was them or not.”

Roger couldn’t return to the airport that night because it was closed; our planes had been the last two to take off that night. So when Narvel got to his room, he found Roger dialing madly to get information. Narvel later said it was easier for him to maintain hope because he didn’t have the sight of a fireball branded in his mind like Roger did. Roger’s brother Wayne was a copilot on one of the planes.

Finally, Roger hung up the telephone and turned to Narvel. “Yes,” he said, “a plane did go down.”

I remember that I was sitting up in bed when Narvel came back. He told me what Roger had learned, and I asked, “Is everybody okay?”

“No,” Narvel said, “they’re not. Reba—it’s a possibility that everybody is dead.”

“Oh, Narvel, surely not!” I said.

“Yeah,” Narvel almost whispered. “Roger thinks from what he saw, he thinks everybody is dead.”

I burst into tears.

Mike Allen, who booked the date, and Sandi Spika had stayed behind to fly home the next day, Sandi with us and Mike on a commercial airline. Narvel telephoned them both and asked them to come to our room.

At that point, we still didn’t know much. It was a while before we would receive confirmation that it was one of our planes that had gone down. And even then, there was no word about survivors.

Through radio contact, the pilot of our aircraft still in the air had supplied his passenger list, so we could figure out who was on the fallen plane. It was now approaching 6
A.M.
in Texas and Oklahoma, where Narvel’s and my parents lived. We didn’t want them to hear the news on television or the radio before we talked to them, so Narvel called his parents and I called mine.

After I heard my Daddy say, “Hello,” I lost it again. Like a fast dream it all went through my mind—they’ll
never hear their daddies’ voices again. Narvel was in the other room getting ready to call the band members’ mamas, daddies, wives, and husbands.

“Hello, Daddy,” I said, “this is Reba. I’m okay, but something terrible has happened.”

“Okay,” he said. I could tell he had been sound asleep.

“We’re in San Diego and the band and crew flew out on two planes and one of them went down and we’re pretty sure everyone is dead.”

That was the first time I’d heard myself say it.

I called out the list of names to Daddy of people who’d been confirmed as passengers on the crashed plane. He kept asking me about others he knew in my group, although I had already told him everyone who I knew was on board.

Mama later told me he hung up and walked into his and Mama’s bedroom, where Mama said, “Clark, what is it?”

He stood there trying to breathe and couldn’t speak. “Wait just a minute,” he said.

“It’s Reba, isn’t it?” she asked.

“No,” Daddy said, “she’s okay. It’s her bunch. Their plane went down, and they’re all dead.”

Narvel called nine families, including his parents, during the next two hours. The rest of us—Sandi, Mike, and I—were still in total shock. I would follow Narvel pacing from room to room in our suite, crying, but Narvel kept a level head, and he later said that staying busy kept him from breaking up. Many times that night I saw him silently hold a telephone while I could hear someone screaming at the other end of the line. It was worse than any nightmare I could imagine.

The Cable News Network and other channels were updating the reports. Narvel moved back and forth between our suite and Roger’s room, where they were receiving information from the various airport workers and rescue
teams. Narvel kept getting conflicting stories, which he’d piece together as best he could and then pass along to the families. Later, we’d learn that it was one of the worst private aviation disasters in the history of San Diego County.

In the tense confusion, Narvel forgot to call his children, Chassidy and Brandon, who were living with their mother in Texas. Cindy Bailey, my son’s nanny, had contacted Shawna, Narvel’s daughter, who was living in Tennessee. And so the very thing that Narvel had struggled to prevent from happening to the other families had happened to his own children. They heard on the news that seven unidentified band members and their manager—the report didn’t distinguish between tour and career manager—in the Reba McEntire Show had been killed. They thought their daddy was dead until they got the facts from Narvel’s Mom and Dad.

I called Barbara Mandrell in the hours after the incident, because Kirk Capello, my musical director, had worked for her before he joined me, and I thought she should know. Barbara is also my closest girlfriend in the music business. I respect her a lot. Barbara had seen tragedy up close, barely surviving a two-car collision that also took a man’s life. And so in this darkest hour of my life I called her because I wanted to talk to someone who knew the Lord as I did. I needed that strength. We cried and prayed over the long-distance telephone.

By now the sun was up, and still there was no official confirmation of the deaths that Narvel and I had reported to loved ones. But aviation officials and rescue workers knew from their calculations what we knew in our hearts—that it was impossible for anyone to survive a headlong plane crash into the side of a mountain.

It would not be till late in the morning that we finally got definite word: I had lost Kirk Capello, my musical director and keyboard player; Terry Jackson, my bass guitarist; Tony Saputo, my drummer; Paula Kaye Evans, my
background singer; Chris Austin, who had just joined us and played mandolin, fiddle, and guitar; Michael Thomas, my guitarist; keyboard player Joey Cigainero; and Jim Hammon, my tour manager, as well as the pilots, Donald Holmes and Chris Hollinger.

A
LOT OF RUMORS AND MISINFORMATION HAVE BEEN PRINTED
about the early-morning events of March 16, 1991. There was speculation, for instance, that the pilots had earlier been drinking inside a bar at Brown Field. They had—they’d been drinking coffee, according to Teresa Sharp, the bartender who served them. There have been rumblings about the last-minute switch in aircraft and airfield, and questions as to whether the plane was under the guidance of an air traffic controller.

So I asked Tom Carter, my collaborator, to go on a fact-finding mission on my behalf, to pull together all the reports on the crash so we could get as close as possible to the truth. Tom went through documents and official reports from the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the medical examiner who performed the autopsies. He examined newspaper accounts and magazine articles, and interviewed Kathleen Tucker, a volunteer rescue worker with the sheriff’s department, who was one of the first five at the crash site. Tom went to Brown Field to interview people who saw the fatal flight depart and who visited with members of my band and their pilots shortly before takeoff. I asked him to visit San Diego’s Otay Mountain, where the plane went down, and to record everything he saw, heard, and felt at the death scene. That’s the only way I could get through the reenactment of the crash. Someday, I also might climb that mountain. But I’m not ready yet.

What follows is, I hope, the most complete account yet that anyone has been able to construct of what happened that night.

The twin-engine Hawker jet left San Diego at 1:41
A.M.
The National Weather Service reported conditions as clear with a calm wind. Official documents place the crash time at roughly three minutes after departure and about eight nautical miles from Brown Field.

According to the NTSB report, released months after the tragedy, the crash occurred on the western slope of Otay Mountain, at about 3,300 feet mean sea level, or about 172 feet from the summit. The mountain is rocky, with vegetation and brush ranging up to eight feet in height. It is steeper in places, according to the report, with “an upslope of about 30 degrees.” It continues: “The aircraft’s left wing first contacted a rock outcropping or small ridge. Scars at this location were consistent with an airplane being in shallow left bank.” An early account suggests that the plane was no longer ascending, but had leveled off, causing investigators to believe that the pilot thought he was flying high enough to be safe. Even though later reports found that the plane was still climbing when it crashed, the pilot obviously had no idea that a killing peak lay in his path. There were no lights on the rural mountain.

Had the aircraft been 200 feet higher, or slightly to the right or left of the peak, it would have cleared the mountain. Instead, the plane clipped the mountain and began to cartwheel before exploding on impact about twenty-five feet away from the second contact point. Mechanical and human remains were scattered for the length of three football fields in grass that was eight feet high. Later on, the firemen, who somehow managed to pull their heavy and awkward trucks up the mountain to put out the fire, spoke of the odor of the jet fuel that hung in the early morning smog more than three hours after the blaze.

The pilot in command of the plane that went down, Donald T. Holmes, 43, was instrument rated and a certified airline transport pilot. The copilot, Christopher D. Hollinger, was also instrument rated and a certified commercial pilot.

How could two such well-credentialed pilots fly into the side of a mountain? Fans and family have asked me that question, but not more than I have asked it myself.

The records of the medical examiner, Dr. Mark A. Super, M.D., show that the autopsies of the pilot and copilot, performed twenty-four hours after the crash, “revealed no evidence of physical incapacitation or impairment that would have been causal to the accident.”

Instead, the National Transportation Safety Board reports trace a fatal series of mishaps leading up to the crash. First, before the pilot could take off, he had to file a flight plan based on instrument flight rules (called IFR), meaning that he would be under the direct supervision and guidance of an air traffic control tower. He called an FAA flight service specialist at nearby Montgomery Field to file his plan, wondering how long it would take to go through and hoping he could avoid a long wait. During their conversation, it was suggested the pilot could take off whenever he wanted if he used visual flight rules (called VFR)—meaning he would not be guided by the tower but instead would be responsible for knowing about and avoiding any obstacles in the terrain that were in his flight path—and then obtain his IFR clearance while in the air. The pilot elected to go that route, a decision not all that unusual for a private airplane pilot.