Posted on Mon, Dec. 19, 2005
Witnesses recall seeing a ball of fire, smoke before plane crash
BY ELINOR J. BRECHER AND DAVID OVALLE
Knight Ridder Newspapers
MIAMI - For a moment, some of the hundreds of witnesses didn't realize
what they were seeing.
"At first I thought it was fake, like it was staged or something," said
Mark Pappalardo, 20, a Chicago tourist who'd been walking the beach
when he saw the Chalk's Ocean Airways plane spiraling down past the
jetty.
But it was all too real for Mats-Erik Lundstrom, a 45-year-old Swedish
shipyard welder who was shooting pictures of his son, Joakim, 18, with
the Olympus Digital 600 camera he bought Friday in his hometown of
Fakenberg.
Father and son were in South Florida for three nights before heading to
the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday.
Joakim had gone into the water near 10th Street. Mats-Erik had slipped
the camera into its case. Looking south, he glimpsed what he first
thought was a commercial jetliner flying way too low behind some
buildings on Miami Beach.
"Oh, this plane must have problems," he remembered thinking. Then he
realized it was a small propeller plane.
"I saw smoke coming out of the engine," he said. "Then it exploded. ...
I could see the wing fell off. It went straight down."
He snatched the camera from its case and fired off a couple of shots,
catching a dark plume of smoke rising from the water.
Joakim, a high school student, had come out of the water and was
toweling off when he saw "a big fireball. We were quiet for about five
minutes looking at the smoke."
His father said, "Oh, Jesus - they are not going to survive."
Seven blocks south, Oscar Diaz, 33, was surfing off Third Street and
Ocean Drive.
"I heard a `whoof,'" said Diaz, a morning program editor for Univision.
"I saw what looked like a meteor, a ball of fire."
Diaz said he saw the plane's left wing in flames. Then it fell off, and
the ascending plane tumbled down, cockpit first, into the water.
"After it crashed, it was so quiet. Nobody knew what to do," he said.
Brian Meklir, 30, was relaxing at the pool after lunch at Joe's Stone
Crab.
"One of the guards yelled," he said. "I looked up, and part of the
plane was on fire - the back side. All of a sudden, the wing came off,
the plane flipped upside down, and it crashed in the water. ... You
want to go help, but you can't; it was far off in the ocean."
Richard Lopes, 51, was fishing on the rocks of the jetty when he saw
the plane emerging from the cut. From a distance of just about 100
feet, he said, he could "feel the heat."
John Hopper, a 25-year-old Miami Beach model and DJ, was headed east on
the MacArthur Causeway when he looked up and saw the same ball of
flames.
It was small at first, he said, "then it grows, and there's an
explosion that engulfed the sky. It turned into thick black smoke. You
could see the pieces of something on fire, but you couldn't see any
recognizable part of an airplane.
"I had a very uneasy feeling because you knew something bad just
happened."
Sandy Rodriguez, 14, was on the beach with friends when he saw the
burning plane tumbling down.
"I got scared," he said. "It looked like it was coming right for us,
but the plane landed on the opposite side of the jetty."
He snapped a photo on his camera phone, later selling it for $10 to a
TV news cameraman. It soon appeared on cable news shows.
Hours later, a man in a gray suit had swooped in, proclaiming himself
his agent and asking thousands of dollars for the image.
"Don't say anything," the man advised the teenager as he hustled him
away from reporters.
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Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Carol Rosenberg, Nicole White
and Susan Anasagasti contributed to this report.
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