Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410310075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SARAH HUNTLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ The details of the plane crash are etched forever in Phil Bradley's memory.
There's the book he was reading as he flew home to Clifton Forge from a business meeting in Oklahoma City. It was "Exodus" by Leon Uris, and he'd read the first 13 pages.
There's the taste of dirt as the DC-3 tore without warning through treetops and slammed into Bucks Elbow Mountain near Waynesboro.
There are the dead, the 26 other passengers and crew members who lay scattered around him. And there are the two bears that traipsed by during the first day of Bradley's 36-hour wait for help.
"The bears came by on Saturday morning," Bradley said. "The big one, she stood on her hind legs, but the cub just looked at me. I thought to myself, 'Now you just keep on going, you fuzzy devils,' and they did. They rambled off."
To hear Phil Bradley tell it, the crash could have been yesterday. But it wasn't.
On Oct. 30, 1959, Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 from Washington, D.C., to Roanoke crashed, killing 23 of its 24 passengers and all three crew members. Investigators with the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board ruled that a navigational error by the pilot, who reportedly was under severe emotional stress, caused the accident.
Bradley, then 33, was the only survivor. During the crash, his seat was ripped from the plane, sending him whirling through the air. When he landed, he was still strapped in.
"I paid for my seat and took it with me," he said, his eyes laughing at a joke he's obviously told often. "It took about five minutes to figure out what happened. I hollered to see if anybody was alive, but no one answered."
At first, Bradley didn't think he was injured. "I thought, 'Well, I'll be darned. I'll be able to get up and walk away from here,'" he said, "but then I tried to get up. That's when the pain hit." He'd dislocated his left hip, fractured his right knee and broken bones in one foot. Unable to move, Bradley waited from 8:40 Friday night until Sunday morning, when the rescue crews found the wreck.
The ordeal taught him about patience, survival and courage. Since the crash, Bradley said, he is fearless.
"I don't know what happened, but I have no fear," he said. "Maybe it comes from the extreme comfort of knowing that my odds were three-and-a-half million to one, and I made it."
Twenty-one years after the crash, Bradley put his bravery to the ultimate test. He took flying lessons and earned his pilot's license. "I think I wanted to see if I had any fear inside of me. I found out, the more I flew, that I don't."
Today, Bradley, a 68-year-old federal labor mediator in Charlotte, N.C., is eager to share his experiences. "People who are afraid of things could get some courage from this story, it seems to me," said Bradley, who wore a unique badge of merit - a silver airplane tie clip. He plans to produce an inspirational video with his nephew, a school psychologist at Franklin County High School, and with the filmmaking son of the flight's co-pilot.
"I think he has a message to offer," Dr. W. Worth Bradley said. "Bad things happen and some are worse than others, but when they do, that doesn't mean you can't cope and get beyond them."
In addition to courage and coping, Bradley's story is one about the power of fate. Bradley wasn't supposed to be on Flight 349 that day. He'd missed his connecting flight. "Shows you what a big dummy I was," he said. "I argued with them to let me on."
As he sat recently at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea in Roanoke, snacking on a Danish and coffee, Bradley departed only briefly from his customary joviality to speak of the horrors: the silence at the crash site, the decapitated bodies around him, the swarm of vultures waiting to swoop down and feed.
"It got deathly quiet. Every once in a while, the wind would blow, and metal would fall from the trees, making a tinkling noise," he said. "I could feel this man's leg next to me, but it was dark. In the morning, I saw he was there, but he didn't have a head."
For the most part, though, Bradley laced his tale with humor. That's just his way. "A little bit of concern is healthy," he explained, "but I'm not a worrier. Worrying tells me someone is too concerned before something happens. Now what's the use in that?"
Even when he lay alone on the mountainside, he wasn't worried, Bradley said. He spent most of his time formulating survival plans, such as trying to catch raindrops with his tongue to quench his thirst.
"I'm an optimist. When I was up there on that mountain, no one could have told me they wouldn't come for me," he said. "I knew they'd show up sooner or later. If they hadn't, I'd have died a worse death than any of the others."
On Sunday morning, he heard his rescuers' voices. "What took you so long?" Bradley asked them. The Air Force paramedics wanted to hoist him up to a helicopter by rope, but Bradley refused.
"I said, 'Oh, no, I just survived that. You're not going to get me up there above those trees and drop me again.'" So they hauled him on a stretcher to the mountain's peak and loaded him into the chopper there.
Dr. Frank McCue was a resident in orthopedic surgery when the crews brought Bradley to the emergency room at University of Virginia Hospital. He was amazed that anyone survived, he said.
"I was on call Sunday morning, and it was early. You could hear the helicopters looking for the plane wreck," McCue said. "When they brought him in, his hip was out of place. That was the main injury. It had been out since the crash."
McCue and Bradley forged a fast connection. "I can remember talking to him. You could hardly know what he was really thinking, but he was very controlled and pleasant to talk to. He didn't express any particular fears," said McCue, who is now the hospital's head of orthopedics.
It's been a long time. When Bradley boards planes these days, he often sticks his head in the cockpit and jokes with the pilots.
"How are you feeling in there?" he asks them. "Are you in pretty good shape?" Then he tells them his story. Some of them remember, but most don't.
"Thirty-five years," he said. "Most of that breed is gone. Now you got the young people who never even heard of the crash."
by CNB