The panic was rising in my stomach, crawling up towards my throat, and threatening to strangle me. I was going to wind up a sad statistic; a small entry in tomorrow morning's paper. It was late and I wondered if I'd make the first editions. I never told my wife much about it, only a very sanitized, non-alarming version, tossed off as a casual reference to last night's flight. It had started out so well, but looking back, you ca'n see the gradual accumulation of small mistakes that I'd made that evening, and how close I had come to disaster. It was one of those FAA Safety Seminars, this one held at Republic Airport at Farmingdale, Long Island. Jim, whom I knew only slightly, a friend of a friend really, came along for the ride as we set off from Caldwell, New Jersey, that late December evening. It was in '92, just a few weeks after "The Perfect Storm" had given the Northeast such a pasting, wrecking the beaches of Fire Island.
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