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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Sally Walker is a scientist. Scientists travel. That simple equation is just a part of academic life,  where the presentation of papers at national and international conferences helps spread ideas and influence.
Walker’s career as a paleoecologist in UGA’s department of geology led her, in October, to the South Pacific island of Bali for the ninth International Coral Reef Conference. Among the splendors of blue waters and the problems of the tourist trade, Walker and her graduate student Lisa Gardiner presented a paper on their work on the evolutionary ecology of molluscs in Caribbean coral reefs.
Walker had never been to the South Pacific and so, even on the plane, she was constantly snapping photographs of the island chains and the vast expanse of ocean. Then, on the return trip, things began to go terribly wrong.
Gardiner and UGA ecologist Bill Fitt, who was also at the conference, left on different flights. Walker took a seat on a Singapore Airlines jet, which had an uneventful first leg to Singapore before heading to Taipei, Taiwan. The Pacific Ocean to the east, however, was anything but calm, as a typhoon had churned through the Philippines and was heading west.
As the flight neared Taipei, the plane slammed into the whipped bands of rain and wind.
Somehow, among sheets of rain and a blistering wind, the pilot managed to get the plane on the ground, where passengers, strung out with nervous energy, began to laugh. Walker and her friend Deborah Brosnan, who had been at the conference on Bali with her husband, Steve Courtney, went to the terminal with the other passengers while the plane was being refueled.
By this time, at nearly 10 p.m., the wind was blowing so hard that trees outside the terminal were bent nearly horizontal. Walker re-boarded and took her window seat. She kept looking out at the storm.
“I asked the steward if they could fly in a typhoon, and he said they did it all the time,” says Walker. Always uncomfortable with air flight, Walker--for the first time ever--moved into the middle seat away from the window.
The plane began to taxi. Walker strained to see outside, but the only light visible at all was on the plane’s wing. The pilot came on and said something Walker describes as “incoherent” followed by “we’re going now” and then “jerked the plane to the left and began barreling down the runway.”
The nose of the plane came up. Two shuddering bumps wracked the plane. Then Walker, who was again trying to calm herself through prayer, was thrown violently forward as the plane crashed in a fireball and broke in half.
“I thought, this is it, I’m going to die,” she says. Weeks have passed since the accident, but she still has trouble dealing with the aftermath. Nightmares come. After giving a couple of initial interviews, she gave none for some time after the event. “I tried to be calm about it. I didn’t want to go yet, but I didn’t have any choice. I just thought, this is it.”
Then, in the raging wind and water, the plane was thrown violently to the left and stopped. A fireball flashed into her part of the cabin and just as quickly went out again. Passengers were burned. Dozens in business class were incinerated in an instant. Walker didn’t see the fireball, and to this day doesn’t remember it, but it must have skimmed over her head before the damaged plane came to a rest. Walker unbuckled her seat belt and stood up. A body fell from higher up, as some of the seats were above her in the “ceiling” of the plane. The smell of jet fuel was powerful, and the sound of the burning plane and oxygen canisters releasing their contents was deafening. In the tail section where Walker and her friends were, there seemed no way out.
She decided to go forward, choking through the smoke. She kept moving, stumbled over some kind of barrier and suddenly found herself at the broken edge of the plane, looking down at grass and water.
Struggling to get away from the fire, Walker fell into a culvert where water was up to her waist, carrying her backward. A man with “one good hand” came to her rescue, pulling her out.
In all, 83 passengers (and four of the 17 crew members) were killed in the crash, though 97 survived. The crash apparently was caused when the pilot turned down a darkened runway that had been closed for repairs and ran head-on into barriers and construction equipment.
By the end of last semester, things appeared to be getting back to normal in Walker’s life. Still, she admits that life since the crash has been hard, and that work, friends, colleagues and students have been her salvation. As the semester was coming to an end, she realized that surviving such a disaster comes at a price. The legal and psychological complications could last for months, if not years. But she is confident that as life goes on, the science that she loves will take her beyond that one terrible night. |
