O.C. Couple Escaped With Nothing but Their Lives : Plane crash: USAir passengers lost their belongings but feel lucky to be alive.

Three hours after Janet and Bill Kilcullen fled from a burning jetliner, they were home, unharmed, hugging their two young children and shaking their heads in disbelief that they were alive.

“My daughter was asking for souvenirs” from a weeklong business trip in Washington, D.C., 26-year-old Janet Kilcullen recounted Monday.

But the bag of souvenirs burned Friday night with their plane. They lost everything--overcoats, their house keys, her purse, Bill Kilcullen’s briefcase, his wallet, their carry-on bag and probably all their luggage.

So Janet Kilcullen held 6-year-old Errin tightly and told her the truth: “Well, Mommy is your souvenir. Mommy and Daddy are your souvenirs.”

“It was very nice to be alive and home,” she said.

Added her 37-year-old husband: “I think we’re incredibly lucky. The more information we get, the more lucky we become.”

For the Kilcullens, part of their memories of that fateful trip are pleasant--for Bill, a weeklong trade fair where he displayed Retix computer systems, for Janet a week’s sightseeing at the nation’s capital.

Then came the long, cross-country trip home seated in the rear coach section of a USAir Boeing 737.

“It was a nice flight, very comfortable--even the landing was comfortable,” Janet Kilcullen recalled. “You could feel the wheels touching. And then there was like a bang. . . . And then flames--orange, on the outside of the plane.”

Flames streaming along its wings, the jet continued down the runway until it hit an abandoned fire station at the end of the runway. The plane continued to burn, Bill Kilcullen said, adding that “the interior of the plane was lit up as if somebody had a campfire going.”

Inside the plane, there were a few screams, but most passengers seemed calm--or perhaps in shock, the Kilcullens said.

“I knew it was happening, but it felt like very slow motion,” Janet Kilcullen said. “I kept thinking, I’m not going to let this happen. The plane will stop and we will all be OK.”

She said her husband’s first reaction when he saw the flames was to look for a blanket, to shield them, “in case a fireball came through.”

As the plane came to a stop, flight attendants shouted, “Calm down! Calm down!” They opened a rear safety chute and helped passengers out of the plane, Janet Kilcullen said.

The Kilcullens were among the first six passengers out of the plane. After the chute emptied them on the runway next to the burning plane, they ran as far as they could along the runway to get away from the flaming wreckage.

At one point, they considered going back to rescue other passengers. But moments later paramedics, firefighters and other safety crews arrived. So, they watched the rescue effort--firefighters pouring foam on the plane, passengers jumping from the burning jet.

Three days later, Janet Kilcullen said, she is still “kind of in shock” from her escape from death--”kind of amazed that I survived. And now I have a real good sense of life.”

Despite last Friday’s terror, both Kilcullens say they will fly again--Bill probably as soon as this weekend, to another computer trade show in Boston.

Still, the accident has made a strong impression on both of them.

“Strange,” Bill Kilcullen mused. “Landings never bothered me. But this may change. A pilot friend of mine has said, ‘Any landing you can walk away from is not a bad landing.’ And I guess it was not a bad landing for us. But it was pretty terrible for the others.”