Into the Frozen Water

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 clipped the 14th Street Bridge moments after takeoff from Washington National Airport and plunged into the ice-choked Potomac River. A blizzard had paralyzed the capital. Seventy-eight people were on board. Only a handful survived the impact, clinging to wreckage in water barely above freezing. Lenny Skutnik, a twenty-eight-year-old office worker at the Congressional Budget Office, stood among the crowd of bystanders on the riverbank.…