EXIT ROW

Former American Airlines salesperson Kling recounts her experiences as a member of the Emergency Response Team assigned to deal with the crash of Flight 965 on December 20th, 1995.

It was a clear night, but Flight 965’s two pilots somehow lost their way and crashed into a mountain peak in the Andean range surrounding the airport in Cali, Colombia. From the moment she receives a middle-of-the-night phone call from the airline informing her “we've had an accident,” Kling plunges into the highly choreographed maelstrom of the company's response routine. (Aptly captured in her present-tense narrative.) Of the 163 people aboard the downed aircraft, 4 have survived, but Kling's first task is to report to a Dallas center where ordinary employees must make the calls informing families of the deceased. Then she's off to Cali to join in coping with the avalanche of administrative tasks surrounding mass tragedy. Running on adrenaline, maintaining as much emotional distance as possible in order to simply keep functioning, Kling files insurance claims, rebuffs the press, and picks up a shipment of hairbrushes that belonged to dead passengers (sent to aid in DNA identification). She then receives her most difficult assignment: aiding a victim's relatives who have traveled to the crash site, although almost the only thing she can do for them is buy cups of coffee and check on their lost luggage. (All Kling’s interactions are in strict adherence to the airline's seemingly bottomless crisis manual.) Finally, in a tacked-on coda, the author recounts her decision to go home and get divorced, her eventual befriending of a crash survivor, her nonprofit work, and her recommendations for future airline response teams.

A sobering peek at the mechanics of dealing with horror.