A Journey into Misery

After a harrowing flight aboard the first private American relief plane to reach Armenia, a TIME correspondent encounters extraordinary chaos, anguish and deep suspicion of Moscow among the earthquake's survivors

The call from the cockpit startled me out of a fitful sleep in the cramped cabin of the chartered Southern Air Transport jet. We had left New York's City's John F. Kennedy Airport 14 hours earlier with a crew of six and four passengers, bound for Armenia with almost 85,000 lbs. of medical supplies from AmeriCares, a nonprofit organization based in New Canaan, Conn. In a race for time, we were the first private American group to be airborne with emergency relief for the earthquake victims.

When I last looked out over the control panels of the Boeing 707, as we were ascending after a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland, the sky had been a brilliant blue, with the first orange and green streaks of dawn. Now nothing was visible through the windshield but a swirling mass of gray.

"Here, see what you can make out in Russian!" yelled one of the crew members, shoving a pair of earphones into my hands. The urgent tone of his voice snapped me out of my drowsiness.

A Soviet aircraft, running low on fuel, was asking for clearance to land at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan. I heard someone calling out numbers over the radio in Russian, but his Armenian accent made them difficult to understand. The Soviet pilot was obviously having trouble comprehending the response too, and asked ground control several times to repeat the coordinates.

The confusion hardly boosted the confidence of our plane's crew, which was awaiting permission to start descending toward the invisible landing strip.

"Flight 528. Over."

A long silence, followed by more cryptic exchanges in heavily accented Russian.

"Five-two-eight. Over."

As strong head winds rocked the plane, the mustachioed young co-pilot looked around anxiously.

"I think we should blow out of here to Turkey. I'm going to ask for the vectors to Ankara."

Finally a response came, in broken English, from the control tower.

"One-five-two-nine to 600 meters . . ."

"This is five-two-eight. Repeat, five-two-eight. Please repeat that."

"One-five-two-nine to 600 meters," came the message.

"That sounded like 1,600 to me," said the navigator. "Did anyone else get that?"

"They're still giving us the wrong call signal," the co-pilot pointed out.

Pilot Jack Thetford, a seasoned veteran of emergency cargo runs, opted to hold course, following the sporadic commands in broken English. The minutes of waiting for the next radio message seemed endless. Since Yerevan is ringed by craggy peaks, even the slightest imprecision in altitude readings could be a matter of life or death. "I looked at my map and could see that at one point they had us heading directly into a mountain," Thetford said afterward.