The nature of luck

This story first appeared in the fall/winter 2011 issue of Portraits Magazine. On Sept. 13, Pitt-Bradford will dedicate a tree in memory of Ed Horbal, Steven Scott and Terrance Doyle. The university’s new artificial turf field will be named Rathburn Family Field in honor of Gary Rathburn.

Gary Rathburn ’68-’70 is either a very lucky or a very unlucky traveler.

In 1986, he watched from the air as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over Cape Canaveral and was on the last plane out of Haiti before Francois “Baby Doc” Duvalier was ousted in a popular uprising. He’s survived an earthquake and a typhoon, been in airplanes that lost hydraulics and an engine, and on the night of Sept. 10, 2001, he slept at Manhattan’s Millenium Hilton Hotel, just across the street from the World Trade Center, and had not yet left when a plane struck the Trade Center’s north tower.

His closest escape from death, however, might have been his first, which took place on a snowy January night outside of Bradford in 1969. Fewer than three weeks before, on Christmas Eve, a propjet on approach at Bradford Regional Airport went down near the Kinzua Bridge. The wings came off the fuselage, which then spun and flipped. Twenty of the 47 passengers died.

The crash was the topic of conversation as Rathburn’s parents drove him the hour from his home in Allentown to the airport in Harrisburg to return to school at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford following the Christmas break. It was Jan. 6.

“My dad and I were joking about the best place to sit on the plane,” he said. His father suggested the wing, so he could jump off onto it. Rathburn decided it was the back – the most flexible part of the plane.

He said goodbye to his parents and girlfriend at the airport, knowing they would stop for a late meal at a favorite restaurant on the way home, then call his grandparents, who would have already heard from him that he’d arrived safely in Bradford.

In Harrisburg, he met his good friend Bill Hughey ’68-’70, and the two boarded the flight bound for Bradford, sitting in the back. There were five other Pitt-Bradford students on the plane, Sue Murphy of Hummelstown, Lynn Youngblut of Lebanon, Ed Horbal, Steven Scott and Terrance Doyle.

The flight left 43 minutes late because of weather delays, taking off at 7:52 p.m. It was a smooth flight. Hughey remembers the flight up from Harrisburg, “At times it was a very clear winter night with the stars out, but as we got closer to Bradford, there were some snow squalls.”

At 8:30 p.m., the “No Smoking” sign came on, and the hostess began walking from the back of the plane to the front, checking seatbelts.

Rathburn said, “She never made it back to her seat.” Hughey said that at first, he thought what he was feeling was turbulence.

“It wasn’t until just seconds before we hit the ground that we felt this bang, bang, bang like severe turbulence,” he said. “That went on for a few seconds.” By now he realized the banging was the plane hitting the tops of trees.

“The lights went out, and sparks shot through the cabin,” he said. “The plane hit the trees, it hit the ground, and we slid” on what turned out to be the fairway of Pine Acres Golf Course in Marshburg.

“Can you imagine crashing on one of the few open spaces in the forest?” he asked.

As the plane ripped through 1,000 feet of forest, its wings sheared off, which turned out to be another stroke of luck.

“A lot of fuel was in the wings,” Hughey said. “We didn’t experience any significant fires. When the plane came to a stop, we were hanging upside down in our seats, and we didn’t realize it. I knew that it was a very, very serious situation. I made sure I had all of my limbs together and made an exit” through a hole torn in the fuselage by the trees.

“It was a kind of eerie stillness,” he said, describing small fires trailing the plane where
fuel had spilled and caught fire. “They were like little bonfires in a way,” something that could
have been cozy on a freezing night.

There was another light, that from the golf pro’s cabin, no more than 100 yards from the
trajectory of the plane’s dive. Three witnesses came from the cabin and started toward the plane to help.

Rathburn said that the first thing he saw after crawling out of the plane was a high school
basketball player, 6-feet 5-inches at least, flopped “like a rag doll. He had about every bone in his body broken.”

Rathburn saw the red glow of a Coke machine in the pro shop and started toward it. The pro and his friends found him along the way.

“They didn’t know what had happened,” he said. “I told them what had happened and why we were there.” Rathburn headed to the pro shop and called his grandparents, then went back to help the other survivors.

Hughey would eventually make his way to the clubhouse, too, and phone his parents back home in Camp Hill just moments before they saw news of the crash flash across their television screens.

The two Pitt-Bradford students helped others out of the crash and were among the last of the passengers to leave the scene.

They found Ed Horbal dead next to Lynn Youngblut, who was severely injured, and managed to get her out of the plane.

Hughey said, “She was in very serious shape. We laid her down in the snow.”

Sue Murphy would also survive, but Steve Scott and Terrance Doyle died along with eight others.

Jay Monti, dean of men at Pitt-Bradford, was on the scene in his role as a member of the American Red Cross.

“We were pulling parts and people out of trees,” he said, for hours.

“I went to the makeshift morgue and recognized the three boys from Pitt,” he said.

Monti called Dr. Donald Swarts, president, who asked him to call the boys’ parents. He doesn’t remember those calls, he said, certain he’s blocked them out of his memory, but remembers dragging himself home to Emery Hall at 4:30 a.m. – when what he had witnessed began to hit him.

Students were gathered in the dining hall of the Emery, where all of the students who weren’t from Bradford lived at the time.

Engineering professor Dr. August “Augie” Freda was among one of the faculty and staff members who, once contacted, showed up at the Emery to comfort students.

“Eugene ‘Whitey’ Bialo, one of the few students with a car, would run back and forth from the Emery to the airport to get information,” Freda said. “The students were shocked. The girls were all crying, and the guys were all sitting around trying to figure out what to do – what to say. All three of the kids killed were my engineers.”

Hughey remembers the effect it had on campus. “It was a very traumatic experience for the entire campus,” which numbered only a few hundred students at the time, he said. Everybody pulled together. Dr. Swarts led a memorial service. It really shocked the entire community.”

Hughey and Rathburn remain friends today. After two years at Pitt-Bradford, they transferred to the Pittsburgh campus and lived in an apartment with four other guys from the Bradford campus. Anywhere from four to six of the housemates still see each other on regular vacations taken together.

While Hughey is still a “white-knuckle” flyer, Rathburn got over his fear early, traveling by air again within a week of the crash with the help of “some Scotch and a few Valium.”

In his job in the coal industry, he’s logged hundreds of thousands of miles in the air.
And the campus got back to normal in a relatively short period of time.

Hughey said, “Young people can get on with their lives pretty quickly.”

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