Once Again Queens Hotel Is Home To Grief

The passengers checking in at ticket desks, delivering their luggage and bidding farewells to friends and relatives as they board the big aircraft anticipating a long journey across the ocean and the trip ahead.
Then the plane lifts into the skies above Queens and within less than an hour it suddenly without warning from the crew, disappears off the radar screens and plummets in to the Atlantic.
JFK Again.
A hotel at the very entrance to the airport by the Van Wyck Expwy. and the Belt Parkway. Frantic relatives of the passengers being ushered into the hotel by security past hordes of television new crews and reporters. Then the somber vigil begins as the world and the relatives wait for word on the fate of their loved ones. And again, the news is bleak. Everyone aboard– hundreds of souls who spent their last hours in this Borough have perished in the crash. And no one knows why. Again.
This was the all too eerily familiar scene at the JFK Ramada Plaza Hotel this past week in the aftermath of the crash of Egyptian Flight 990. Officials of the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and other care organizations, and members of the clergy descended on the hotel to keep the relatives informed and counsel them in their distress. Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani personally monitored the scene at the hotel as well as officials of the airline and the Port Authority, managers of the airport.
This is the same scene that was played out at the Ramada in July of 1996 when TWA Flight 800 left JFK bound for Paris and only 18 minutes into its flight, suddenly came apart and plunged into the Atlantic off the Long Island coast killing all aboard as the wreckage set fire to the ocean. As the horrified world watched, divers searched for the bodies and for any signs of evidence as to what caused the 747 jumbo jet to fall from the sky. Terrorism was immediately suggested. Then rumors of a missile shot from below, possibly in an accident by the U.S. military. Ultimately, an exhaustive year-long investigation left no certain answers other than the belief that it was due to a mechanical problem in the aircraft’s fuel tanks.
But the Ramada was the focal point for the grief that followed the disaster, with President and Mrs. Clinton coming to the hotel personally mourn with the families of Flight 800 and assure them that the government would do everything in its power to find answers.
Then in 1998, again at JFK. Two Hundred Twenty nine passengers on SwissAir’s Flight 111 boarded their plane on a trip to Geneva. Within less than an hour it disappeared above the icy Atlantic, crashing near a tiny fishing hamlet in Nova Scotia. And also again, the JFK Ramada Inn was conscripted by authorities to be the focal point for the families initial grief and planning for the search for answers as to why the jumbo jet–without warning g or emergency mayday calls–fell from the sky. And again, there were never any definitive answers.
This past week at the Ramada there was the shock and mourning in the grand ballroom, usually reserved for gala, not grim,  occasions. The hall was eerily bedecked in skeletons and other horrific images that were decorations for a Halloween party earlier in the day. They were quickly removed. But in hushed voices, real experts in aviation and security affairs were actually using phrases like a "Bermuda Triangle" to describe why a third jet disappeared without explanation in roughly the same flight path. they added this year’s disappearance of JFK Jr.’s plane in this area also. JFK Again.
In fact, the Ramada Hotel has an interesting connection to the late president for whom the airport would later be named. In 1960, when the airport was called Idelwild, a young presidential candidate named John F. Kennedy was staying at the hotel, which was then called International Hotel. While there, he made a major decision for his campaign and later the presidency itself. He phoned then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas from his hotel room and asked the powerful Senate majority leader if he would join him as vice-president on this ticket. Johnson accepted and the rest was history. This past Monday , the buses began to leave the Ramada to take the relatives to the Rhode Island site where the plane fell. Just as the buses had left the Ramada before to bring the families closer to their loved ones. Those passengers and tickets bound for Paris Geneva and now Cairo, but found their destination would be the bottom of an ocean only minutes away from their take-off at JFK. Again.