How I survived a plane crash in the exact spot where 67 people died in Washington DC

A man who was in a 1982 plane crash over the Potomac River in Washington DC recalled how he survived the crash that took 78 lives after a similar tragedy happened last week in the same river.

Joseph Stiley, 86, of Puerto Escondido, Mexico, was flying out of Washington National Airport – now Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport – with his assistant when he knew before takeoff his flight was going to go terribly wrong.

‘I was a busy flight instructor and I specialize in teaching aeronautics and instruments… I went through a survival school for pilots,’ he told People. ‘I knew we were in deep s**t before we were off the runway.’

Stiley credits his pilot’s training as the only reason he and his assistant, Patricia Felch, survived when the Air Florida Flight 90 scraped the 14th Street Bridge and plummeted into the icy Potomac River on January 13, 1982.

The then-Vice President of General Telephone & Electronics (GTE), who was living in Virginia at the time, told Felch to brace her back against the seat in front of her.

‘I wrapped myself in a little ball and got down and put my back against the seat in front of me with my hands over my head,’ he told the magazine. Felch did the same and they were one of the five passengers to survive the crash.

Stiley would endure more than 60 broken bones and be the most injured passenger. At one point, doctors even considered amputating his leg.

‘All the fingers on my left hand and a couple of them on my right hand got broken, so it was a good thing I had my fingers where they were,’ he recalled from the crash.

Stiley was knocked cold during the impact and only woke up when cold river water began filling his mouth and nose.

He began to work to get him and Felch out and had his assistant hold onto his leg while he reached ‘as far as I could’ to grab Priscilla Tirado, who also survived the crash. Her baby and husband did not.

Grabbing Tirado nearly caused all three to drown as she was frantically looking for her baby, who was the last body to be found ‘all the way down in the Chesapeake Bay a week later’, Stiley recalled.

Flight Attendant, Kelly Duncan, then 22, who also survived the crash, recalled spending 20 minutes in the cold Potomac River after the impact. She said she was initially mad at the people staring at the survivors, who were clinging to the tail of the plane, from the bank.

The experience became religious for the self-described party girl, who had a rowdy weekend in the Florida Keys just the weekend before.

‘I felt like that was the first time I felt God’s presence,’ she told The Washington Post in 2012 about her freezing time in the water. ‘I don’t know how people could go through something like this without faith.’

Stiley remembered coming out of the broken plane and seeing the rescue helicopter and the ambulance and the lights at the hospital, he said in 2012.

He also remembered the 18 months of intense physical therapy he had to endure before returning to GTE, only to find someone had replaced him. He left a few weeks later and eventually moved to the West Coast to work in tech before moving to Mexico.

The day of the crash, Stiley was missing his son’s 12th birthday to head to Huntsville, Alabama, to tell GTE employees that the factory was being sold and the majority of them were going to be laid off.

Instead, he was rushed to the hospital with six dozen broken bones, and said his body has never fully recovered from his injuries.

He is still handicapped due to spinal damage and doctors had inserted steel pins into his shattered tibia.

‘They were going to amputate because of the nature of the damage, and I’m sure glad they didn’t,’ he told People.

To this day, Stiley still walks with a limp – a constant reminder of what he survived. And he still avoids commercial flying after the crash.

‘I have only flown maybe three times commercially since then because I don’t trust airline pilots, especially the ones who were not military trained,’ he told People.

Unlike the trained pilot, Tirado would eventually return to her aviation job mere months later, before eventually leaving to study early childhood education.

Felch later died from cancer, Stiley told People. The other survivor Bert Hamilton died in 2002 of a heart attack, The Guardian reported.

Stiley relived his horrific memories when he watched the coverage of the newest DC plane crash when an American Airlines flight and an Army Black Hawk collided midair and crashed into the Potomac River on January 29, killing 67 people.

‘My heart goes out to all the families and it goes out to those that died, but of course, they don’t know that,’ he told People. ‘My biggest concern now is for the probable children that have just lost a parent… and of course the spouses.’

As for himself, he has to remind himself that he managed to save two people in his disaster.

‘I was alert to what was happening and I figured out what to do and did it, and I brought somebody else out, and I brought [out] a lady that was sitting beside me,’ he told the magazine.

‘I remind myself of that sometimes.’