The Secrets of Harry Bright

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The single-engine Cessna 172 was a tiny blip on the radar screen at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field. Air-traffic controllers also watched another blip, PSA Flight 182 en route from Los Angeles. Suddenly the impossible: two blips merged.

Nothing was ever heard from the Cessna. It fell like a shotgunned dove. The last official communication from the PSA pilot said: “Tower, we’re going down! This is PSA!”

There followed a seventeen-second silence, but the voice recorder carried the pilot’s final words: “This is it, baby. Brace yourselves.”

There was yet another message on the recorder found that Monday morning in 1978, after the country’s worst domestic air disaster to date. The message was a version of the declaration most often uttered on deathbeds as well as on all the battlefields of life. A child cries out to a parent. The final words on the voice recorder: “Ma, I love you.”

Many North Park residents thought it was a monster quake. They waited in terror for aftershocks. Then a firestorm and a mushroom of black fuel smoke turned terror to panic. Some now thought the prediction had been fulfilled: San Diego was among the first of Russian targets!

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