Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Sally watched a plane spiral clockwise into the ground.

She couldn’t remember who she’d been talking to, just hung up. She raised the volume on the monitor to hear the network feed, then flipped to the other news networks. They were all on-set shots of the anchor desks in New York or Atlanta. FBN would be first with actual video of the crash, just as they’d been the first to have someone in the field.

Sally called the bureau chief and said, “Someone needs to come down and take a look at this,” and when the chief wanted to know what exactly she was referring to with that indefinite pronoun, she told him, “The gold standard. Flight 503.”

The bureau chief sent a production assistant, who didn’t bother with introductions, just took the camera from this teenager and asked if it was cued up, hit the Play button and watched the video, grainy, shot handheld and underlit. Holy shit.

At that point, the PA hit Stop and just said to the room, “Come with me,” and Sally and the kid and the PA went together into the control room. In the crush of the busy afternoon, no one noticed the chime of unanswered calls while Sally narrated for the kid what was going to happen next. “We’ll get someone from Legal on the phone, and you’ll have to sign a release.” Somehow they’d agreed on a price without anyone thinking how strange it was for these de facto negotiations to have been conducted by the receptionist; Sally had shuffled enough paper in the past to anticipate every argument, and she spelled it out for the bureau chief: they could label the kid as an independent contractor to satisfy the standards-and-practices people and the attorneys who kept insisting that this network wasn’t in the business of paying for the news.

The accountant on duty would cut the kid a check in the low five figures. All the kid wanted was his name on the screen, Footage courtesy of Jeris McDougal, and the bureau chief had to sign off on that.

The production assistant dumped the tape into a deck, and the monitors in the control room split into two distinct categories: those showing the live network feed and those showing the plane in its final moments. The bureau chief was on the phone to New York control, saying, I know you think I must be some kind of fucking Huckleberry, but the kid has the shit, and, He’s got it on tape, and, We’ve got it cold, and, No, no one else has it, and finally exasperation took hold and he shouted into the handset, “He has the crash on tape. The plane. Right into the fucking ground!”

The kid kept trying to say My name is Jeris as he stood in the control room of the Dallas bureau, watching the tape with a paternal pride, expecting a high five, because to him the tape was the first verifiable evidence of his powers of persuasion, documented and incontrovertible, and he knew the technicians were alternating between watching the monitor and watching him.

At time code 0:00:12, the abrupt presence of horizontal lines fluttered across the tape, as if the control room had tuned in on a vintage, tube-powered television. The interference was caused by a camera powering up at random, and the tape had a bit of vertical roll to it, which made the producer in the room think of his childhood, the old nineteen-inch Philco black-and-white, the first television he had ever known, and his afternoon struggles with a rabbit-ear antenna, all for the pleasure of watching the local UHF channel, its grained and snowy broadcasts of Japanese kids’ shows, Marine Boy and Ultraman.

In the foreground, a girl—freckled and prematurely endowed with the prominent curves and sun-damaged décolletage of a much older woman—sat on the edge of a motel-room bed. The voice of some young man, presumably the same one who was now standing in the reception area, started cajoling her to remove her top. The girl who’d arrived with Jeris couldn’t make eye contact with anyone in the room; she could tell by the way they were looking at her that they only wanted to know just how far the girl on the tape was willing to go.

The image of the girl working at the buttons on her blouse, a midriff-baring silver number stretched across her ample chest, and a voice asking, What you gonna do, are you going to suck my cock? You know how I like to watch you do that— and Christ, the editor thought, she has to be the same age as my little sister. The voice told her, Undo another button; stand up and show me what you got on under that skirt.

Then the kid went running out the motel-room door and into the parking lot, and the sudden flush of daylight saturated everything into such bright hues that on the control-room monitors, the light of the sky and the color of the cars and the glint of this girl’s silver shirt as she appeared in the corner of the frame—standing in front of the cameraman by about a foot, she asked the question everyone asks of a man holding a camera at a moment of crisis, Are you getting this? —it all appeared with the shining brilliance of an old Kodachrome snapshot. The camera began to move, and the editor thought, Yes, yes, kid, follow the action. The guys who worked in television—the VTR and chyron operators, the video editor—they too felt a certain vicarious pride that the kid had been smart enough to know he had something, a passenger jet and its continual spiral of right-hand turns, the inevitability of its uncontrolled descent.

To the film editor, a man in his early sixties, the images looked like the handheld battle footage he’d shot himself in Vietnam, the camera with its distinctly first-person point of view, These are the men of the air cav, First Division, First Squadron, Ninth Cavalry; this morning they dropped in An Loc, fanning north toward the Cambodian border, and you are there. (In the sixties, he’d shot tape in Danang, shot the aftermath of Tet, and the proudest moment of his career was when his 16-millimeter Bolex got loaned out to one of Cronkite’s guys, who toted it between hot zones.) He marked out the first twenty-five seconds with a digital tag, the part with the girl in the top and the aborted motel-room fucking of two kids. The bureau chief told him to cut in the fluttering of those vertical lines, the camera powering up, so that the tape opened with the plane, visible, already in its final spirals. The time code on the digital display said that the relevant segment—the plane as unidentifiable streak in the sky, gleaming and silver, to the moment that implied impact, the plane disappearing at the bottom of the horizon and the view obstructed by the corrugated-steel warehouses and sprawling three-story office buildings that surrounded DFW Airport—ran thirty-two seconds.

The rewound tape went straight into the broadcast feed. Everyone at the network listening on a headset or an earpiece heard the director saying, “Cue chyron,” and “Thirty-two seconds of tape,” then the director’s quieter, “Roll VTR in three, two, one.” Anchorman Max Peterson watched his own image depart from the monitor, and the fly-in of chyron that gave the event FBN’s official title: DISASTER: THE CRASH OF PANORAMA 503. He’d covered the elections of three popes and five presidents, and whenever he had to fly by the seat of his pants, he eased forward in his chair, and his voice, always mellifluous, slowed down, and he could hear the sentences forming in his mind before he spoke them, an unattributed gift springing from a source he never understood. “You are watching an FBN exclusive, amateur footage being fed to us now, live and unedited, from our Dallas bureau. The last moments of Panorama Airlines Flight 503 captured on tape, as it struggled in an apparently futile attempt to make an emergency landing earlier this afternoon at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport.”