In a place inaccessible by roads, plane travel is a routine part of life, and the crashes are always personal. They are about somebody you know, somebody you know of, or you yourself. It forg- es a kind of promise in the community; a tacit add-on to the social contract that says if you go missing, I will look for you, because one day you may have to do the same for me. The Aug. 9 “Stevens crash,” as it would come
to be known, was the 53rd time a plane had gone down this year. Twelve days later, a plane with four people went down in the same region. The search went on for 15 days and covered 60,100 air miles without fi nding anybody. Thirty-eight years earlier, a plane carrying
House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and U.S. Rep. Nicholas J. Begich disappeared on a fl ight from Anchorage to Juneau. The fruitless search lasted 39 days. In the decades since, tens of thousands of fl ights have followed that same route without ever catching sight of the missing airplane. The red pins, the green pins, the pins of the
never-found — and then there was one last type: the pins of those who were found days or weeks or months too late, with death coming slowly to those who survived the crash but not the unfor- giving elements. As the shock wore off and his breathing grew
labored, O’Keefe lay in the wreckage with his dead and badly injured friends, thinking the odds were against them. Will we live long enough to be found? He kept that thought to himself. What he could not know was this: The lodge
they had fl own from thought they were out fi sh- ing; the camp where they were headed to fi sh assumed bad weather had turned them back. As the clouds and chill rain closed in, no one in the world even knew they were missing.
THEN CAME WHAT might have been a whis- per, or might have been a bellow, but for a man of abiding Catholic faith, it was the sure sound of a miracle. “What’s going on here? When are we going
to fi sh?” O’Keefe had refused to allow the thought that
his son was hanging dead in a harness fi ve feet away. Now Kevin had come to. “When are we going to get to the fi shing?” “We’re not,” his dad told him. “We crashed.” Wow, Kevin thought through a muddled haze.
Why are we not fi shing? His teeth felt wrong, and he thought he must have lost one. Actually, his jaw was broken. The cockpit radio had been crushed, so the only
hope of reaching help was to fi nd another radio or satellite phone somewhere in the mass of stuff.
WILLIAM “WILLY” PHILLIPS JR.
KEVIN O’KEEFE
SURVIVORS
THE
The pilot, Terry Smith, didn’t respond when
they called his name. One glance told Kevin he was dead. It all felt surreal. Somebody asked from the back: “Could you
go through his pockets? See if he has a cellphone so we can call out.” But even though the dead man was chilling-
ly close, he was just too far to reach. “I couldn’t move my leg, and my hip was all out of place,” Kevin said. Still strapped in his seat belt, Morhard had
JIM MORHARD
slipped head fi rst into the rear of the plane, very badly hurt and unable to move. O’Keefe was still trapped by debris. The job of searching the plane fell to 13-year-
old Willy Phillips, who had a battered and broken ankle but was the only one able to move. “Where’s my dad?” he asked. “He’s right here with me,” O’Keefe responded,
leaving it at that.
WILLY WAS A tough kid, the youngest from a big-time football family. His dad, Bill, played col- lege football at the University of Evansville in the 1970s, and three older brothers currently played at Stanford, Virginia and Indiana. Nor was Willy a stranger to Alaska. He’d been
to the log-cabin GCI Lodge on Lake Nerka, in the southwestern bush, so often he knew where the fl y rods were tucked away and he had confi dently led Kevin on a winding hike through the forest- ed hills. Willy’s dad had given them all a tour of the closest town, Dillingham, population 2,500, a place so removed that driving to the outskirts is on the top 10 list of things to do there. The whole bunch of them — the O’Keefes,
the Phillipses and Morhard — had been com- ing to Alaska for years on business and pleasure because of Stevens. All three of the men had worked for the senator on Capitol Hill, bonding in the trenches of partisan politics and raising their families in suburban Washington. They re- vered the 86-year-old Stevens as a mentor and friend; he treated them like sons and their chil- dren as family. O’Keefe went on to head NASA and now headed the aerospace fi rm EADS North America. Phillips and Morhard were lobbyists. Sometimes the old man would dispense the
wisdom of the ages, and other times he resort- ed to the tough love of someone who had been weathered by brutal missions fl ying the China- Burma route during World War II. “You gotta get over it, chief,” he’d say. And that was the challenge facing the young-
est among them on the afternoon of the senator’s death. Just how much could he handle? They needed him to search the big pile of junk for a radio, but somewhere in there, O’Keefe knew,
NOVEMBER 28, 2010 | THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 13
PHOTOGRAPH OF MORHARD BY GEORGE TOLBERT; KEVIN O’KEEFE COURTESY OF O’KEEFE FAMILY; PHILLIPS COURTESY OF PHILLIPS FAMILY VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
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