‘What if ?’

Steve Addy

Thursday, Aug. 16, 2001 | 3:15 a.m.

Facts and figures on UNLV tight end DeJhown Mandley:

Age: 21 (March 19, 1980)

Hometown: Mesa, Ariz.

Year: Junior

Size: 6-foot-4, 250 pounds

Background: Started all 12 regular-season games last season, all 11 in 1999, and caught a touchdown pass each year. ... Redshirted in 1998 after coming to UNLV from Mesa HS. ... Father Pete was NFL wide receiver for five years with Detroit (1984-88) and two with Kansas City (1989-90). ... Has four sisters: Treazure, Cashay, Dinero and Mink.

The intermittent rumble in the sky over Rebel Park provides accompaniment to the whistles, grunts and instructions of UNLV football practice.

As airplanes approach nearby McCarran International Airport, they often fly directly over the Rebels' field. Even on a cloudless day, the engines' roar bounces around the valley sky just long enough to be replaced by a new arrival from over the Eastern mountains.

Every now and then, the buzz catches DeJhown Mandley's ear, and UNLV's junior tight end glances skyward. And he wonders.

"I look up and I think, 'What if? What if that plane's going down and it's going to land on the field?' " Mandley said.

As irrational as his worst-case scenario sounds, he is entitled to his fears.

Fourteen years ago today, Aug. 16, 1987, the lives of DeJhown, his mother Teresa and sister Treazure were unknowingly spared by a family decision to stay an extra day in Detroit, where his father Pete Mandley was playing wide receiver for the Lions.

By canceling reservations on Northwest Airlines Flight 255, bound for Phoenix, the Mandleys avoided the third-worst air disaster in U.S. history, a Sunday night crash on takeoff at Detroit Metropolitan Airport that killed 154 passengers and crew, along with two people on the ground.

Only a few hours earlier, Pete and Teresa Mandley had decided the family would fly home to Mesa, Ariz., on Monday.

Then, in a suburban Detroit hotel room, they watched with shock and sorrow as local TV described the grisly scene -- a railroad embankment near a freeway overpass, where the DC-9 crashed upside-down at 8:46 p.m., 30 seconds into a four-hour flight, a half-mile outside the airport.

Rescuers found the lone survivor, a 4-year-old girl, cradled in the arms of her dead mother, a few feet from the bodies of her father and 6-year-old brother.

DeJhown Mandley, a different kind of survivor, was 7 years old.

"I was young and it was a shock to know we were going to be on a plane that crashed," he said. "Every time I get on a plane now, whether I'm with the team or going home by myself, I say a prayer for a safe takeoff and landing."

One look at DeJhown Mandley and you instantly know he is Pete's son.

At 6-foot-4, 250 pounds, DeJhown has grown a head taller and 50 pounds bigger than Pete was during his seven-year NFL career, but he has inherited his father's face and good hands. UNLV is counting on DeJhown to play a greater role in the offense this season.

He wasn't a prime target last year despite starting every game, though Mandley averaged 16.3 yards on six receptions, including a 15-yard touchdown against Wyoming and a 40-yard grab at BYU.

"I think this is my year to shine," said DeJhown, the only Rebel named after a French cartoon cat. "I'm not saying that to benefit me, but for the offense to go and the team to be successful, I need to do my part."

Mandley has a good role model at home in Mesa, because dad, now 40, was a pretty fine player himself.

A second-round draft pick out of Northern Arizona in 1984, Pete Mandley had 172 catches in five years with the Lions and two years with Kansas City, scored 14 TDs and ranked among the NFC's top punt returners. He returned one 81 yards for a touchdown in 1986.

Pete was coming into his prime as training camp opened in 1987. Despite the four-game NFL players' strike, it would become his best year, as he led Detroit with 58 catches for 720 yards and seven TDs. He ran back a punt 61 yards in a win over Dallas.

But it could have turned into a tragic year for Mandley and family, if not for a decision made with no clue about the calamity destined for the night of Aug. 16.

The Lions lost to Indianapolis the previous night in an exhibition at the Silverdome, and Teresa Mandley had flown in for the game with DeJhown and 10-month-old Treazure. Pete had most of Sunday off, so he wanted his family to stay the whole day and go home Monday.

Besides, the baby had broken out in hives because of a reaction to some medication, so Pete and Teresa agreed. They canceled their unpaid reservations on Flight 255.

While Pete returned to camp for evening meetings, Teresa and the kids stayed at the hotel. They were watching a TV movie when the news flashes began.

Bad weather was moving in around Metro Airport as 149 passengers and a crew of six boarded Northwest 255 and taxied to runway 3C around 8:40 p.m. There was rain in the vicinity, and a windshear advisory had been issued.

The two pilots were trying to get out ahead of the rain, and they also didn't want to lose time to Orange County, the flight's final scheduled stop, where planes were subject to late-night noise curfews.

A federal investigation would determine that they were in too great a hurry.

As the plane sped down the runway, following a northeastern path, veteran fliers on board must have already known something was wrong.

The flaps and slats, easily visible along the wings, had not been extended, making liftoff virtually impossible, and the aircraft used almost the entire 8,500-foot runway on its takeoff roll.

The DC-9 lifted off lazily, hesitantly. The plane immediately began rocking laterally. Fifteen seconds into takeoff, it had climbed barely 50 feet when it should have been at 750.

The staggering plane was doomed. It clipped a light pole in the National Car Rental parking lot, 2,760 feet past the runway, shearing off 18 feet of the left wing, then brushed the roof of the Avis Rent A Car building. The engines stalled.

The plane slammed into the ground, on its back, on Middlebelt Road near the I-94 overpass and disintegrated. Two motorists were killed, and fires raged in and around the wreckage.

Rescuers found 4-year-old Cecilia Cichan, badly burned, alive in her dead mother's arms. But there would be no more miracles.

With 154 fatalities on board, it was then the second-worst air disaster in U.S. history, trailing the 1979 American Airlines crash at O'Hare International in Chicago, where 275 died. Since then, the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 over the Atlantic, killing 230, has surpassed Flight 255.

As the Lions gathered for practice the next morning at Oakland University in nearby Rochester, it was already known that Phoenix Suns backup center Nick Vanos was among the crash victims.

A reporter innocently asked Pete Mandley if he had ever returned to Arizona on Northwest 255. He said yes, then soberly volunteered, "My wife and kids had reservations on the flight last night, but they didn't go."

The words were jarring.

"There they are, right there," he said, pointing to the practice field sideline. There stood Teresa Mandley, holding Treazure, with young DeJhown alongside.

"A miracle? Oh, yeah," Pete said. "My family and myself are very fortunate they didn't take the flight. I thank the Lord.

"But it's hard to say that it's our good fortune when it's so many other people's misfortune. Such a tragedy."

That afternoon at 3, Teresa, DeJhown and Treazure boarded a flight home -- on United Airlines -- but there was more distress awaiting them. Teresa's mother, Fay White, had been rushed to a Mesa hospital with a mild heart attack after hearing the initial news reports.

She hadn't known they changed flights.

"ACFT WAS DESTROYED."

That was the hauntingly cryptic notation in the National Traffic Safety Board report on the crash of Flight 255.

Investigators viewing the wreckage of the ACFT, short for aircraft, were quickly drawn to the flaps and slats, which were found retracted (not extended). Without their deployment, an airplane would behave exactly as the DC-9 had. It might get off the ground, but wouldn't climb significantly.

Also, the cockpit voice recorder showed that the crew hadn't initiated the standard taxi checklist. The first item on the list: extension of the flaps and slats. The NTSB cited the pilots for failure to follow proper procedures and inattentiveness.

Long before the investigations and litigation were complete, flowers and a memorial marker were planted at the crash site.

DeJhown Mandley didn't seek to tell this story. He hasn't told anyone. His coaches didn't know. Most of his UNLV friends didn't know. He was surprised this week when the Sun asked about it.

"We just tried to forget about it," Mandley said. "I hadn't thought about it for a long time."

But he acknowledged that the episode changed him. It's a searing lesson for a 7-year-old to discover that airplanes occasionally fall out of the sky and that the people on board usually die. It's also a lesson in the element of chance, of sheer blind luck.

One-hundred-fifty-four people got on a plane, DeJhown Mandley didn't. They died, he didn't.

"It didn't hit me until I got older," he said. "I guess I understood at the time, but it didn't really affect me as much as it did later on.

"I just thank God we didn't get on the plane. I give praise to God. That's all I can do."

Mandley insists he isn't a nervous flier now. In his Rebels career, the team has flown to such faraway destinations as Mississippi, Iowa and Hawaii with routine takeoffs and landings.

Two weeks from today, the Rebels will go to Arkansas to open a season of great promise. Mandley will be in the starting lineup that Thursday night, and it's the anticipation of that game that sustains him and his teammates through the heat and boredom of two-a-days at Rebel Park.

As they practice, planes still fly overhead and the sky shakes. DeJhown Mandley doesn't always notice them, but his silent prayers accompany every flight.