From 6,000 feet, the Mississippi sunset looked like a postcard in a souvenir shop. Billy Powell was enjoying the view. Ronnie Van Zant was asleep on the floor. Some of the guys were playing poker. And the hardest-working rock 'n' roll band in America was about to run out of gas.
It was the last flight of Lynyrd Skynyrd: Oct. 20, 1977, the night they drove Ol' Dixie down.
The band had risen out of Jacksonville on the wings of such anthems as "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama." But just as they were beginning to reach their zenith, the Skynyrd boys would go down with the sun, plunging into the southern Mississippi countryside in a plane crash that would kill Van Zant; guitarist Steve Gaines; his sister, backup vocalist Cassie Gaines; and road manager Dean Kilpatrick.
"We were cut off right in the middle of our stride," drummer Artimus Pyle says.
If you believe in omens, there were plenty: flames shooting from an engine on a previous flight, a just-released album featuring a song about "the smell of death," Van Zant's own premonition that he would die young. But it wasn't supposed to happen so soon.
"It was a real pleasant flight, and I remember it to this day, to this second," Powell, the Skynyrd keyboard player, recalls. "I looked at my watch when we were going down. It was 6:48 p.m., and there was a beautiful horizon. The sun was going down, and I had like a panoramic view of a beautiful sunset. It was just as peaceful as all get-out. We were playing cards, and everybody was just doing their own thing."
It was only days after the release of the Street Survivors album -- whose cover showed the group engulfed in flames -- and the Skynyrd band, which had just begun a nationwide tour, was on its way to Baton Rouge, La., from the previous night's performance in Greenville, S.C.
Two days earlier, on a flight from Lakeland to Greenville, guitarist Allen Collins reported seeing a 10-foot flame shooting out of the right engine of the chartered Convair 240.
"When Collins got on, he was sitting there going, 'Man, this ain't right,' " Rossington adds. "He knew."
The group decided the flight to Baton Rouge would be one of Skynyrd's last in the 30-year-old aircraft. The hardest-working band in America deserved better and was planning to switch planes a few days later in Dallas.
"We had talked about that an hour before we went down," Pyle remembers. "We had decided to get a Learjet for the band, a beautiful bus for the crew. It was ridiculous for us to be on an old plane like that."
At 6:42 p.m., according to a National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the crash, the Convair's flight crew radioed the Houston Air Traffic Control Center and reported the plane was low on fuel: "Yes, sir, we need to get to a airport, the closest airport you've got, sir."
But they'd already flown over the closest airport, in McComb, Miss., and co-pilot William Gray told the 24 passengers to strap in, that the plane was running on empty and an emergency landing was imminent. They hoped to belly- flop in a muddy field a few miles to the south.
"I was real proud of everybody," Powell says. "Instead of panicking, everybody was sitting there praying."
Pyle, who like Powell is a pilot, instructed the other passengers in the proper crash procedure. "I told everybody to put out their cigarettes and turn out all the lights and bend over," Pyle says. "I did the stewardess trip." Then he went to the cockpit.
"The pilot, Walter McCreary, turned around and looked at me and said, 'Go back to the fuselage and strap yourself in,' " Pyle says. "And I could see fear. . . . I could see death in the man's eyes. He was a good pilot, but he kind of freaked a little bit. Nothing like that had ever happened to him."
On his way back to the cabin, Pyle met Van Zant, and they grasped each other's hands.
"Ronnie Van Zant walked to the back of the plane to get a pillow, and as he walked forward, he shook my hand," Pyle says. "We looked at each other and smiled, and he continued forward and sat down. Ronnie knew that he was going to die."
Van Zant took a seat between Collins and Rossington. Across from them, in facing seats, were Gaines, his sister and Kilpatrick. Of the six, only Rossington and Collins would survive.
Powell buckled in next to production manager Clayton Johnson. Johnson joked that this would be his last "low-budget tour." Powell prayed that it wouldn't.
Almost 10 minutes elapsed from the first warning until the eventual crash, Powell says. It was as if he were standing on a gallows, waiting to hear the executioner's song.
"I was going, 'We're fixing to die, man.' I said, 'God, please don't take my life.' . . . I can't describe the feeling that was going through me, knowing that I was fixing to die."
The Convair came down at a 5-degree angle that grew steeper after the initial impact with the treetops. As it sliced its way through the timber, the plane cut a 500-foot path.
"I remember we started clipping those pine trees, and I heard a real loud cracking noise," Powell says. "The crash itself only lasted about 15 seconds at the most. . . . It felt like being rolled down a hill in a garbage can and being hit by about a hundred baseball bats at the same time. That's the only way I can explain it."
The estimated time of the crash, according to the NTSB report, was 6:52 p.m. It occurred a few miles outside of Gillsburg, Miss., a blink-and- you'll-miss-it crossroads just north of the Mississippi-Louisiana line. Including both pilots, six people died. Twenty survived.
Of the survivors, Rossington, Collins, bassist Leon Wilkeson and backup vocalist Leslie Hawkins were the most critically injured. Powell and Pyle were two of the most fortunate.
"I remember my seat belt breaking, and I crashed through a table face- first," Powell says. He felt for his nose and found it on the side of his face, but he remained conscious.
"I walked out of the fuselage, and the cockpit was gone, both wings were gone and the tail section was gone, just crushed to pieces," he says. "I sat on top of the airplane, which was turned sideways. I just sat there for a while, going, 'What has happened?' And I was crying.
"I jumped off and there were people screaming. I remember hearing Leon screaming, 'Get me out of here.' People that were still in the fuselage were trapped by seats and debris and metal and stuff. I just walked around trying to help whoever I could. I took my T-shirt off and I was holding my nose on with that."
Pyle, a former Marine, had noticed the plane's path as it was descending and kept an eye out for any sign of civilization. Although he suffered cracked ribs in the crash, he managed to run for help, along with road-crew members Ken Peden and Mark Frank.
"I made my way through a swamp," Pyle says. "The impact of the crash had knocked my shoes off and my socks were hanging over my toes about six inches, but my chest was so broken up, I couldn't bend over to pull my socks up. It was very hard to walk through the briars and the brambles. . . .
"I got up in the front yard of this house, and this guy -- his name was Johnny Mote, and I'll never forget him -- he had a shotgun and he pointed it at me. Then he put it up in the air and fired it 'cause I was covered with blood and he thought I was an escaped convict. When he did, I fell to the ground and I yelled, 'Plane crash.' And he ran to me and helped me to my feet."
While Pyle navigated, Mote drove to the crash site with a caravan of pickups and four-wheelers in tow. "He put me in a pickup truck, man, and said, 'You point to where you came out of the swamp.' . . . This guy drove right through the fences, across the road, through the ditch, and I'm looking behind us, and there's like all these vehicles following us through the mud." Mote, a dairy farmer, was bailing hay when the twilight crash occurred. He and his workers heard the noise but thought it was an automobile wreck. "It sounded like a car sliding in gravel or something," Mote says. "We drove up and down the road hunting it, and we couldn't find anything, so we went on back in the field and started working. It was just beginning to get dark."
Mote says it was "a good 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes" before help arrived.
"I had heard it," Mote says, "but I didn't know what it was. If I had known what it was, I could have got there as soon as it crashed. I could have driven right to it.
"If they had gone another 100 yards, they would have landed in my field, but they just didn't quite make it."
Mote wasn't prepared for what he saw.
"When we first got down there, you could hear them whining," he says. "Some of them were crying and hollering. It got to me."
A neighboring farmer, Dwain Easley, helped lift the bodies out of the wreckage. "To me, it looked like everybody in there was all on top of each other, packed in there," Easley says. "As we pulled people off the top, we found people underneath those people. I never had seen anything like that."
The rescue operation became a community effort. In addition to the local citizens, the Pike County Civil Defense Council, the Pike County Sheriffs' Department, the Amite County Sheriffs' Department, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, the Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center and the U.S. Coast Guard assisted in the rescue operation.
"I just remember waking up in a field with the helicopters over us, with their search lights shining on us," Rossington says. "I've been somewhere lately where a helicopter came over with them lights and it just freaked me out. I can remember that feeling, and I felt like shooting it down or something."
"The injuries were such that every single second counted because every single second there were people losing blood," Pyle says. "To me, it's a miracle that a plane that crashed in the manner that we did, and the tiny little pieces of garbage that the plane ended up being, it's just a miracle that 20 people lived through it, that only six people were killed."
It was because of Pyle's instincts that more lives were spared, Powell says.
"I can say to this day, honestly, Artimus Pyle, thanks to him and Kenny Peden, that they saved more lives," Powell says. "Thanks to Artimus, the townspeople came. And they came on foot and pulled people out one by one and put us in different cars and trucks and stuff and took us to the emergency rooms.
"If he didn't run for help, then more people would have died from loss of blood, like Leon. He was dead on arrival at the hospital, and they pumped blood back into him and brought him back to life -- twice. But he would have definitely died in just a few more minutes from loss of blood. It was scary, the scariest thing I've ever experienced."
Pyle feels it was God's will that he was saved.
"There were no heroes, man," he says. "I went for help, yeah. . . . I really felt like God spared me to do that, but I certainly wasn't a hero. It had nothing to do with that."
Wilkeson, who suffered a broken jaw, a crushed chest and internal bleeding, was rushed to a hospital in nearby McComb. Rossington, Collins and Hawkins were transported to hospitals in Jackson. Powell and Pyle were taken to hospitals in Jackson and Magnolia respectively and were released the week following the crash.
Powell was the only survivor who was able to attend Van Zant's memorial service in Jacksonville five days later. Steve and Cassie Gaines were buried in their hometown of Miami, Okla., two days earlier.
The probable cause of the crash, according to the NTSB report, was "fuel exhaustion and total loss of power from both engines due to crew inattention to fuel supply."
The report added: "Contributing to the fuel exhaustion were inadequate flight planning and an engine malfunction of undetermined nature in the right engine, which resulted in higher-than-normal fuel consumption."
The Convair had taken on an additional 400 gallons of fuel before departing Greenville at 5:30 EDT on the evening of the crash. According to pilot McCreary's flight plan, the trip to Baton Rouge was to take two hours and 45 minutes. Including the supply added in Greenville, the plane had five hours' worth of fuel on board. When it crashed more than two hours later, it was carrying a single quart. Because so little fuel was on board, the plane did not go up in flames on impact, which helped save more lives, the NTSB report says.
The report, issued in June 1978, concludes that the fuel supply was exhausted because the right engine -- the one from which Collins had reported seeing flames earlier -- was burning more fuel than anticipated because it was being operated in the "auto-rich" fuel mode, which increases consumption.
The report adds: "The crew was either negligent or ignorant of the increased fuel consumption because they failed to monitor adequately the engine instruments for fuel flow and fuel quantity.
"Had they properly monitored their fuel supply and noted excessive fuel consumption early in the flight, they could have planned an alternate refueling stop rather than attempting to continue the flight with minimum fuel.
"In addition, the Safety Board believes that the pilot was not prudent when he continued the flight with a known engine discrepancy and did not have it corrected before he left Greenville."
Between them, McCreary and co-pilot Gray had logged more than 9,000 hours of flight time, but only 106 of those hours were in the Convair.
Rossington, though, blames no one for what happened.
"There's a million 'maybes' and 'ifs' and 'should haves,' " he says. "But what happened has already happened. It didn't matter what caused it. It was unfortunate, but it happened. After the fact, to learn why, it doesn't really do anything to you."
Although he acknowledges pilot error, Pyle says the band's management and the band itself were just as responsible for the crash.
"We should have had better transportation," he says. "The cheapness ended up taking us down.
"The reason we crashed was as much our fault as it was anybody's fault," he adds. "And I don't think anybody in the band would dispute that. We can be held to blame as much as our management, as much as neglect on anybody else's part. We were so happy to have those gigs to go to, like any rock 'n' roll band is really glad to have a gig. And we lost sight of how we were getting there.
"There were a lot of people on the plane that knew something was wrong," he says. "But we all kind of followed each other, and that's where we made our mistake.
"With our management neglect and our own neglect, it added up to a plane crash, and we had one."
For Powell, the emotional scars left by the crash cut deeper and crueler than the physical ones.
"I wondered when the airplane crash happened what I was doing alive," he says. "I blamed it on God: He took my career away from me. And I went into a deep state of depression for about a year. I hit the bottle real heavy."
Three years after the crash, Rossington, Collins, Powell and Wilkeson reunited to form the Rossington-Collins Band. Beset by personal problems -- including the death of Collins' wife, Kathy -- the group broke up after two albums for MCA.
"We were still pretty bitter that Ronnie was gone and Steve was gone and Cassie was gone and Dean was gone," Powell says. "The drinking and drugs got heavier during the Rossington-Collins Band than ever."
Rossington has tried to put the crash behind him, and it's been only in the past months -- since the surviving band members announced plans for a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute tour -- that he's talked candidly about it.
"For that to happen was such a shock," he says. "We were real close and we were like brothers. We weren't like a band that just got together when we played. We lived together and fished together and hung out together.
"We had our act together, and we were doing good and we were happy and Ronnie had just had a new baby," Rossington says. "It was just real bad timing. . . . I didn't ever -- until today -- come to terms with it. It's just something you learn to live with."
Since the crash, Rossington has married Dale Krantz, who sang vocals in the Rossington-Collins Band, and they've moved to Wyoming, where they have two babies, Mary and Annie, and a log cabin in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Family life, Rossington says, has helped him deal with the memories of 10 years ago.
"It makes me know I had a reason to keep on living," he says. "If I would have died, Mary and Annie wouldn't be here. It's kind of funny how your fate ends up. The people who died, I see their ex-wives and families have changed. They've gone on their ways.
"It's 10 years later," he adds. "You've got to go on with life. Everybody would be crazy if they thought about all the bad stuff."