The Man Who Passed the Lifeline Five Times

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 barely cleared the runway at Washington National Airport before clipping the 14th Street Bridge and plunging into the frozen Potomac River. Of the 79 people on board, only six initially survived, clinging to the wreckage of the plane's tail section in water barely above freezing.

About 20 minutes after the crash, a U.S. Park Police helicopter arrived, lowering a rope and lifeline to the survivors. What happened next became one of the most extraordinary acts of selflessness in American history. Arland D. Williams Jr., a 46-year-old federal bank examiner from Atlanta, caught the lifeline each time it reached him - and again and again, passed it to someone else instead of himself.

Williams could not have known whether the helicopter would return fast enough. He could not have known how long his body would hold out in the 34-degree water. He only knew that someone else was closer to death than he was - and he acted on that belief again and again. When the helicopter came back for him, the wreckage had shifted and Williams had slipped beneath the surface. His cause of death was listed as drowning - the only passenger whose death was attributed to drowning rather than impact.

On the shore, another act of heroism was unfolding.

Priscilla Tirado, one of the survivors, was too weak to hold onto the helicopter's lifeline and fell back into the river. Lenny Skutnik, a 28-year-old Congressional Budget Office employee who had been watching from the bank, stripped off his coat and boots and dove into the icy water in his shirt sleeves. He swam to Tirado and pulled her to safety. A separate bystander, Roger Olian, had also entered the water earlier in a desperate attempt to reach survivors, though he was driven back by the cold.

The aftermath reshaped Washington in lasting ways. The damaged span of the 14th Street Bridge was renamed the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge. Investigators did not confirm that the man in the water was Williams until about a year and a half later. In June 1983, his 17-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son were in the Oval Office with President Reagan to accept the Coast Guard Gold Lifesaving Medal awarded to him posthumously. Skutnik and fellow bystander Roger Olian received the same medal, and Reagan invited Skutnik to the State of the Union address on January 26, 1982, where he sat in the gallery beside Nancy Reagan and was singled out during the speech. He is widely credited as the first ordinary citizen honored that way.

That gesture created an enduring tradition. Presidents have seated civilian heroes and ordinary citizens in the gallery for almost every State of the Union since. In Washington political circles, these guests are still called "Skutniks" - a term still used in political journalism more than four decades later. One plane crash on a frozen river produced two of the most powerful symbols of civilian courage in modern American history.