Lights zoomed by the window. Then came the jolt.
“It was just the biggest impact I’ve ever felt in my life,” Silva said Saturday. “Like an explosion, almost.”
Seconds later, Silva felt water. “Up to my ankles,” he said. “And there was water coming in from above the roof of the plane.”
The Boeing 737 had slid off the runway of the naval air station in Jacksonville and into the shallow waters of the St. Johns River. All 136 passengers and seven crew members would be rescued, 21 of them with non-life-threatening injuries. But all Silva knew at the time was that the flight, which had taken off from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had landed in water — and that someone was yelling something about smelling jet fuel.
Silva, 35, a civilian safety manager for a roofing company, grabbed his backpack, which was hanging from an overhead bin that had popped open. He opened the exit door and found himself on a wing of the plane.
Others began filing onto the wing, amid the darkness, rain and lightning. Eventually, the passengers made it onto an evacuation raft, children and women first, and emergency workers used a cable to guide them ashore.
Pets traveling in the plane’s cargo hold were presumed dead, said Kaylee LaRocque, a spokeswoman for the naval air station. Navy personnel had not been able to reach the cargo hold, which took on water, LaRocque said.
“We can’t get them out because the aircraft is not safe right now,” she said. Four pets were listed on the flight manifest, though more could have been taken aboard at the last minute, LaRocque said.
A team of 16 investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Jacksonville on Saturday to begin to figure out what went wrong, said Bruce Landsberg, the board’s vice chairman. By Saturday afternoon, investigators had recovered the flight data recorder, according to a post on the NTSB’s Twitter account.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.