Word: bragg
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When word came that the Las Palmas Airport had been reopened, the KLM craft was still refueling, blocking the Clipper's way. Pan Am First Officer Robert Bragg radioed to KLM, asking how much longer the refueling would take. "About 35 minutes," came the crisp reply. Bragg and Grubbs measured the clearance around the KLM plane, found it inadequate to taxi past. KLM would have to take off first...
...considered C-l inactive because it was blocked by aircraft and assumed that the final turn was the "third intersection" the tower meant the plane to take. Pan Am was only about 475 ft. away from its safe exit when all hell broke loose. Captain Grubbs and First Officer Bragg saw lights blurred by fog on the runway ahead of them. They thought the lights were stationary. But the glows loomed larger. They were moving...
...yelled Bragg as Grubbs gunned his engines in a frantic effort to veer onto the grass and out of the path of the onrushing KLM. As the crew stared in horror, the nose of the KLM lifted sharply?but not high enough...
...Bragg felt his craft shudder and heard a sound that one survivor described as being like "someone ripping a large piece of tape off the ceiling." From just two feet back of the cockpit to the tail, the entire top of the fuselage was gone. Both wings collapsed on the tarmac, engines still running. Bragg reached for the fire handles above his head. He grabbed only open sky. As the cockpit floor gave way, Captain Grubbs fell into the first-class compartment below, then somehow stumbled onto a wing and dropped to the ground. "Just to sink down...
Finally Buffalo got help. President Carter first declared a regional state of emergency so that federal funds could be used to remove snow and restore health and safety services. The Army flew in 300 men from an airborne engineer task force at Fort Bragg, N.C. They arrived with snowblowers and trucks. The Air Force sent a C-130 cargo plane from Cleveland with needed repair parts for snow-removal equipment, and another plane hauled in cots and blankets from Washington, D.C. More than 500 National Guardsmen pitched into the snowbanks. Later, Carter declared nine counties a major disaster area, thereby...