Crash survivor sifts through wreckage
Boston-born author Robert Sabbag was flying high in June 1979. He was 32, the bestselling author of “Snowblind,’’ a now-classic nonfiction account of the cocaine trade, and the new owner of a beautiful home on Cape Cod.
On the night of June 17, flying back to the Cape from New York, his Air New England flight with nine other passengers aboard crashed in the dark woods near Hyannis.
Sabbag describes the horrific crash and what it did to his body: “My back broke as I was thrown forward, wrapped around the restraint. The lap buckle snapped my pelvis.’’ Sabbag’s face slammed into the seatback in front of him, breaking his nose and severely damaging his neck. The plane’s pilot, George Parmenter, was killed, the sole fatality.
For years after the crash, Sabbag tried to move forward, to get beyond the traumatic damage done to his body and psyche, but he decided he couldn’t walk away from the wreckage without going back and exploring it again. “Down Around Midnight’’ is Sabbag’s absorbing and dramatic attempt to uncover meaning from that 1979 trauma, to uncover the mystery of what it did to him and the other survivors. This “is a story about memory,’’ writes Sabbag, “about the things we can never forget.’’
The author, a veteran journalist, examines the crash both as an outstanding reporter investigating an old story, talking to those involved and meticulously piecing together the evidence, and also as a survivor confronting his own demons and the inevitable vagaries of memory. What’s most notable about Sabbag’s account in his absolute refusal to offer simplistic stories of inspiration, epiphanies about the meaning of life, and/or easy moments of redemption.
“I don’t know if I can say how the crash changed me,’’ he writes, “or whether the changes were for the better or the worse . . . you can’t really think of yourself as anything but lucky.’’ While Sabbag finds and interviews many of the other passengers (some refuse to talk to him, including the co-pilot), there are no Oprah-worthy tearful reunions here. Sabbag finds stories of simple heroism, but none of these survivors, all of them with strong connections to Cape Cod, ever sought publicity or attempted to cash in on the tragedy.
Sabbag interviews survivor Paul Boepple, then a medical student who went on to become a pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital. After escaping from the wreckage, Boepple tells the author, “I went back in’’ to pull out a badly injured girl.
Another passenger, Suzanne, meets with Sabbag and describes how, after she escaped the wreckage, she walked through the dark woods in order to hail a passing car and get help for the other survivors. The first responders to the 1979 crash tell Sabbag what they did, and the harrowing conditions they faced, but none of them wants to be viewed as a hero.
Sabbag describes the exact cause of the accident, which the National Transportation Safety Board blamed on pilot error during the plane’s approach. Sabbag also explores the psychology of the survivors, especially his personal difficulties coping with survivor’s guilt: “It expresses itself in feelings of sadness and shame, a debilitating sense that one really shouldn’t be alive.’’
The crash “took away my immortality,’’ he writes, “ the sense of invincibility that maturity inevitably tempers.’’ Throughout, Sabbag’s most admirable quality is his determination to use both his journalistic skills and his own emotions to guide him toward the truth of what happened that terrible night and since.
Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester. 
