In Terror, Stranger Helped Stranger : Survivors: Peaceful flight ended with an explosion and fireball. In the smoky chaos, scrambling passengers assisted others to safety.

Scott Vaughan was reading the business section of the Washington Post, relaxing at the end of his five-hour flight home Friday night after a two-week business trip back east. As the plane landed, he heard a loud boom. The sound was unmistakable.

The plane was crashing. The 26-year-old marketing manager from Agoura Hills looked out the window on Row 19 and saw a bright orange fireball. Within seconds, the cabin had filled with smoke so thick he couldn’t see his own hands. He cupped them over his mouth and tried to remain calm. Amid the screams of the other passengers, he heard a stewardess yell, “Just don’t panic! Stay low! Don’t panic!”

Suddenly, in a way he is still struggling to understand, Vaughan’s life had become intertwined with those of the 88 other passengers and crew members aboard ill-fated USAir Flight 1493. Together, they groped for survival, helping those they could, praying for those they were forced to leave behind.

“Everybody was helping everybody,” said Vaughan, who scrambled onto the wing of the plane and then yanked seven or eight other people out with him. “You couldn’t believe how many people were trying to care for other people.”

On Saturday, as the terror of Flight 1493 began to ease, its survivors reflected on an ordeal that they said will change their lives forever. Some wondered when, or if, they will ever feel ready to fly again. Others tried to come to grips with the fact that they lived but others died. They recounted, in frightening detail, escapes that left them feeling close to people whose names they may never know.

It had been, until landing time, an extremely pleasant trip. Barely a hint of turbulence and best of all, from the perspective of Peter Strasen, right on time. The plane touched the ground at 6:11 p.m., on schedule. Strasen, a 60-year-old businessman from Manhattan Beach who was seated in Row 8, was looking forward to getting home to see his wife, Leann.

He knew something was wrong the moment he heard the screech of the aircraft’s brakes. He felt the plane weave from side to side. Then he saw the fire. Explosion, he thought. There is going to be an explosion. He hoped that if he died, it would be over fast.

Two rows ahead of him sat 36-year-old Ronald Givens, who was on his way from Pickerington, Ohio, to Los Angeles to attend his father’s funeral. Like many of the others, he had no idea that the Boeing 737-300 had struck a smaller aircraft, and then smashed into an unoccupied building. He only knew that his life was in danger.

“Not me,” he said to himself as the plane skidded across the runway. “Not now.”

Alysse Rosewater and her cousin, Laurel Bravo, were not far away, in Row 4. This was to be the beginning of a 10-day vacation in Los Angeles, a much-needed break from what Rosewater called “the February blahs” in her home state of Ohio.

As the plane made its descent toward the airport, the cousins struck up a conversation with the stranger next to them. He offered his advice on Southern California tourist attractions. They jotted notes as he told them how to beat the lines at Disneyland and Universal Studios.

The plane, they said, landed with a bang and a slight jolt. Then a second jolt. “Everyone flew forward,” said Rosewater, a 22-year-old marketing analyst at Proctor & Gamble. “It was like hitting against a brick wall. The plane didn’t seem to be moving anymore but the passenger momentum kept moving. The seat belts were pulling on us.”

The cousins were petrified. They clutched each other, waiting for some news from the cockpit, perhaps a reassuring word from the pilot. There was only silence.

Then, in an instant, the people in front of them were gone.

“The people in front of us flew forward and those people just vanished,” Rosewater said. “Everything from there went real fast. There was a lot of smoke. The stewardess was saying at first to get down. But there was so much pandemonium that you couldn’t hear who was saying what. People were pushing. People were saying, ‘Stop pushing.’ People were pushing because we were all stuck in the aisle.”

The cousins inched their way back toward an emergency exit, Bravo first, then Rosewater. Holding hands and coughing from the smoke, they crawled out onto the wing, then jumped down to the Tarmac, feeling lucky to be alive.

Toward the back of the plane, meanwhile, Vaughan was trying to make his own dash for a door. He unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, struggling in his panic to remember the location of the nearest emergency exit.

Somebody had opened a hatch in the rear of the aircraft, and other passengers were escaping through it, sliding down a chute to the ground. But Vaughan didn’t know it. He never looked behind him.

Instead, he ditched his briefcase--wallet and all--and clambered over the seats until he reached the middle of the plane. Then, facing what seemed like a wall of people, he dived onto his stomach and slithered out onto the wing. He then stood up and began pulling his fellow passengers to safety.

One by one, they jumped past him to the Tarmac, leaving the plane engulfed in flames behind them. “They were reaching their arms out to me,” he said. “I was trying to get everyone through as fast as I could. Meanwhile, the firemen were squirting foam all over the place.”

Out on the wing of the plane, Vaughan was coated with the white foam that firefighters were spraying to extinguish the flames. He helped people escape until emergency crews ordered him off the aircraft. Then he jumped off and looked back at the plane, now broken in two. He thought it looked like an accordion, crumpled and blackened by the fire.

A young woman, one of those he had helped out of the plane, stood next to him. As the emergency crews and firefighters continued their work, the two survivors--for the moment no longer strangers--walked away from the scene, arm in arm, leaning on each other for support.

STORIES OF SURVIVAL Passengers on USAir Flight 1493 fought through darkness and smoke, scrambling over seats and bodies, to make it to safety. Most of the survivors apparently escaped through an emergency exit over the right wing, but some slid down a chute in the right rear. Here are glimpses of some of the survivors’ ordeals. Sitting in the fourth row of the tourist section, passengers Alysse Rosewater, 22, and Laurel Bravo, 24, go down the aisle and out the right wing exit, jumping from the wing to the ground. “The row ahead of us just disappeared,” recalled Bravo. “The seats all went flying downward.” Passengers Laurie Bell, 28, Doug Folden, 22, and Ronald Givens, 36, all on the right side of the sixth row, also make it out the wing exit. “The door got jammed up so bad I had to jump across the top of someone,” said Givens, who suffered from cuts, bruises and smoke inhalation and spent the night in Freeman Marina Hopsital. Sitting in the seventh row, Chul Hong, 62, escapes through the nearby wing exit and says later, “I thought I was going to die.” Passenger Michael McCarthy, 37, about five feet behind the wing exit, joins those escaping out it, but still suffers smoke inhalation. Passenger Dan Goss escapes through an emergency chute. “I went out the slide on the rear and took off running because there was a hell of a lot of fire,” he said. Later, the damaged chute hung limply on the ground. Seeing “a mob of people” in the aisle, passenger Scott Vaughan, 26, crawls over seats to make it foward to the wing exit. “I never looked back,” he said. Passenger Peter Strasen, 60, is well positioned to make the wing exit and escapes with only a smudge on his khaki trousers. Co-pilot David Kelly, 32, reportedly jumps to safety, suffering two broken legs.