Robbins - The Last Stand of Payne Stewart The Year Golf Changed Forever

Mina, South Dakota, October 25, 1999

The ghost flight lost its right engine first and banked gently to the east as if preparing an approach to land. The left turbofan quit next. The slender nose of N47BA, a white Learjet 35 trimmed in gold and gray that carried six people and a thirty-pound golf bag, pitched in the direction of the South Dakota prairie more than eight statute miles below and began to fall, half a continent from where it was supposed to be, at 12:11 p.m. central standard time on October 25, 1999.

For the two pilots and their four passengers, the morning began with a smooth morning ascent over central Florida into faint winds and forever visibility. The airplane reached twenty-three thousand feet. An air traffic controller in Jacksonville instructed the crew to climb to thirty-nine thousand, swing west, level its wings, and cruise to Dallas Love Field, where it was supposed to unite the reigning U.S. Open champion with an old friend from college, and then deliver him later to the last golf tournament of a resplendent season. But no one replied to that last command, and the aircraft made no change in heading. It just kept rising and rising.

Sometime after 8:27 a.m., when the controller last spoke with the pilots of N47BA, the cabin lost pressure, starving everyone aboard of oxygen until they lost consciousness, as if they slept to their eventual death. The military sent fighter pilots to examine the aimless Learjet. The aviators reported frost inside the cockpit windows and no response to their radio calls. Television networks broke from programming with scant details about a rogue business jet flying up the middle of America with a famous golfer inside. A question arose: Where and when would this Learjet come down? Shortly after noon, a group of pheasant hunters crunched through dormant cornstalks near Aberdeen and noticed a streak that looked like lightning.

The question now had its answer.

Here. Now.

N47BA was airborne for three hours and fifty-four minutes, most of that time on autopilot, to a score of bells, alarms, chimes, and claxons that no one heard. It covered fifteen hundred miles over eight states. US Air Force and Air National Guard pilots from three different installations intercepted the Learjet on its northwesterly journey as aviation experts calculated end-of-flight scenarios that took into account airspeed, fuel capacity and consumption, weight, heading, thrust, the direction and velocity of the wind, and vulnerable populations below. The Learjet touched an astounding altitude of forty-eight thousand feet, the ceiling for an aircraft on the ragged edge of an aerodynamic stall, and there it bobbed like a porpoise at 540 miles an hour. In the thin air of the upper stratosphere, the temperature hovers at sixty-nine degrees below zero, with little turbulence, meaning the aircraft cruised surely and steadily, locked under its own command, until the two Honeywell TFE371s on the aft fuselage exhausted the fuel tanks on the tip of each wing. As N47BA gathered speed and neared the earth, an effect called Mach tuck pulled the nose of the Learjet farther and farther down, until the aircraft was nearly vertical.

It was a quiet scenario that, from the time the engines wound down to impact with the ground, took less than a minute to complete. The episode that killed Payne Stewart, who had reached a personal and professional apogee in 1999, commenced with no violence until, as the world watched and waited to see how it all would end, his aircraft, twirling downward like the stripe on a candy cane, met the prairie at nearly the speed of sound.

For decades, professional golfers have flown thousands of miles to compete. Air travel allows them to spend more time at home, more time practicing before tournaments, more time at lucrative appearances between official starts, and less time in a car subject to speed limits and traffic. Tragedies are rare. Until Stewart boarded N47BA, no high-profile golfer had died aboard an aircraft since 1966, when a Beechcraft Bonanza carrying the effervescent Tony Lema crashed the day after the PGA Championship at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio. Like Stewart, the charismatic Lema, who was thirty-two when he died, lived and played boldly and vividly, so much so that when he won the 1962 Orange County Open, he treated the entire press tent to champagne. Lema enjoyed his best season in 1964, when he won five titles, including a five-stroke victory over Jack Nicklaus in the Open Championshipknown more commonly in the United States as the British Openat St Andrews in Scotland. Lema and his young wife, Betty, were traveling to a two-day exhibition in Illinois when their charter encountered engine trouble, clipped the ground near the border with Indiana, and exploded in a golf course lake. Lema often credited Betty for the happiness in his life. She was a flight attendant. They met on an airplane.

Payne Stewart left his home in Orlando early on that October morning in 99 for a quick business trip and his last tournament of his best season in years. He had an appointment in Dallas to discuss the design of a golf course for the teams at Southern Methodist University, his alma mater. He planned to go to Houston next. He was in the Tour Championship with twenty-nine other players at Champions Golf Club. He planned to spend the off-season with his family in Florida.

It had been a redemptive return to prominence for Stewart. Hed earned more than $2 million that season. Hed won his tenth and eleventh PGA Tour tournaments, including his third major championship, in a twenty-year career that included eight other victories worldwide. Hed played on the American team that won the Ryder Cup matches that September against Europe over a regrettably contentious three days in Brookline, Massachusetts. His victory in February at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am had come four years after his last win, ending a slump that was so frustrating he considered quitting the game.