As she remembered in her 1994 autobiography Reba: My Story, the extended weekend beginning March 14, 1991, was shaping up to be a busy one for country music superstar Reba McEntire and her band.
A performance that Thursday in Saginaw, Michigan, was to be followed by a private show for IBM executives in San Diego on Friday, after which the band would immediately return to the Midwest for back-to-back gigs in Indiana. Three jets were leased to shuttle them back and forth in relative comfort.
But it was grief, not comfort, that overshadowed the jet-setting performance plans when one of the planes crashed on their journey east. McEntire narrowly escaped, but nearly every member of her band died in the accident. In the wake of the tragedy, the “Queen of Country” was left to pick of the pieces. She memorialized her fallen friends in a Grammy-nominated album, but the pain from that night more than 30 years ago has never faded.
The band’s flight plans changed on short notice
The singer and her then-manager-husband, Narvel Blackstock, embarked on the second leg of the weekend on Friday. When they arrived at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field (now the San Diego International Airport), road manager Jim Hammon presented a looming dilemma: The band was likely to finish that night’s performance sometime after 10 p.m., making the rush to have everyone and everything ready to go before the airport’s 11 p.m. curfew difficult but doable.
Blackstock suggested having the two planes move to the nearby private airport of Brown Field, which had no curfew, so the band could fly out at their leisure after the show. They settled on that plan and decided McEntire, who was hindered by a bout of bronchitis, would stay overnight and join the band Saturday on a third flight.
It was seemingly a typical night on the road, though McEntire would later be able to recall everything down to the smallest detail. She closed out the show at the Harbor Island Sheraton Inn with her usual a cappella rendition of “Sweet Dreams,” her band packing up while she was still on stage. Afterward, Hammon walked McEntire and Blackstock back to their suite, the three enjoying “the first hint of spring” on the balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean before Hammon slipped out to join the rest at the airport.
The crash was described as a “huge ball of fire”
At about 2 a.m., McEntire was jolted awake by the telephone. It was their private pilot, Roger Woolsey, who begged Blackstock to come to his room. Once he was there, the pilot relayed an ominous report: He had left the band and traveling crew at the airport, ready to fly off in two of the jets, and was driving back to the hotel when he saw “this huge ball of fire” in the rearview mirror.
A phone call confirmed that a plane did crash, though it would be an agonizing wait to find out more details.
Eventually, their worst fears were realized with the confirmation that the ill-fated plane was one of their own. All 10 people aboard, including eight from McEntire’s band, died. The victims were keyboardist and bandleader Kirk Cappello, fellow keyboardist Joey Cigainero, drummer Tony Saputo, guitarists Michael Thomas and Chris Austin, bassist Terry Jackson, backup singer Paula Kaye Evans, and road manager Hammon. The plane’s two pilots, Donald Holmes and Christopher Hollinger, also lost their lives.
The pilots were attempting to fly through an unfamiliar area
Through reports filed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, McEntire was eventually able to piece together what happened.
Holmes, the main pilot, had called an FAA service specialist to file a flight plan and inquire how long he would have to wait. He was told he could take off immediately if he used “visual flight rules,” requiring him to be responsible for knowing the terrain.
Holmes called back twice more, mainly to make sure he wouldn’t cross into the complex map of controlled air space in the region. During the final conversation, he received confirmation that it was fine to direct the plane northeast and remain below 3,000 feet.
At about 1:45 a.m., a few minutes after takeoff, the jet was flying at 3,300 feet when the left wing clipped an outcropping of 3,500-foot Otay Mountain. The collision sent the plane cartwheeling into the rocky peak with a massive explosion.
Some newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, had accounts of rainy and windy weather in the vicinity of Otay Mountain, though the National Weather Service reported clear conditions. Ultimately, the two pilots were faulted in the official NTSB report for being unfamiliar with the area, and the FAA specialist also drew blame for his directions prior to takeoff.
McEntire overcame the tragedy but remains haunted by its memory
In the aftermath, McEntire canceled all gigs for the foreseeable future. She soon realized, however, that she would sink into despondency with nothing to do and announced she was returning to work. As originally scheduled, she performed at the Academy Awards on March 25, just nine days after the crash. She performed the Oscar-nominated, Shel Silverstein–penned song “I’m Checkin’ Out” from Postcards from the Edge (1990). (Meryl Streep, the movie’s star who had also earned an Oscar nod that year, had originally performed the song.)
“I went ahead and sang the song because I felt Jim Hammon talking to me saying, ‘Go do it for us. We’re checked out of this heartbreak hotel,’” McEntire later said, referencing the song’s chorus.
Finding replacement musicians to play with surviving saxophonist Joe McGlohon and steel guitarist Pete Finney—both on the second plane—brought logistical complications to an already difficult time. Fortunately, Dolly Parton graciously let McEntire have full use of her bandleader, Gary Smith, who leaned on his contacts to pull together a group.
To her credit, McEntire recovered and found a way to thrive professionally in the face of tragedy. She poured her grief into the critically acclaimed album For My Broken Heart, released that October. The title track and “Is There Life Out There” hit No. 1 on the Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. The project was later nominated for Best Country Vocal Performance, Female, at the Grammy Awards and Album of the Year at the CMA Awards.
Come March 1994, the singer won the second Grammy of her career as “Does He Love You,” a duet with Linda Davis, was named Best Country Vocal Collaboration. By the following decade, McEntire had completed the transition from Queen of Country to full-blown celebrity with the launch of her hit sitcom, Reba.
Still, the personal scars never fully faded. She broke down while discussing the topic with Oprah Winfrey in 2012, noting, “I don’t guess it ever quits hurting.” The singer regularly shares remembrances of her late friends and bandmates on the anniversary of that dark day.
In March 2016, 25 years after the plane crash, McEntire showed that the memory of her former bandmates remained close at hand by posting pictures of her visit to the crash site on social media, captioned with: “I feel in my heart that they know we still miss them so much.”
