Joe Sharkey, travel writer who survived a mid-air collision, dies at 77
Joe Sharkey, who provided pragmatic advice to business travelers in hundreds of columns in The New York Times but found himself at the center of a harrowing disaster in 2006 when the business jet he was flying over Brazil collided with a Boeing 737, died on November 6 at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was 77.
The cause was a stroke with high blood pressure, said his wife, Nancy Sharkey, a retired Times editor.
Mr. Sharkey was returning home from a freelance assignment for Business Jet Traveler magazine on September 29, 2006, a Friday, when the plane clipped a wing and tail from the Embraer Legacy 600 carrying him, four other passengers and a pair of passengers. . man crew at 37,000 feet above the Amazon rainforest.
The business jet managed to land safely at a remote military airport, but the Gol Linhas Aéreas commercial plane it collided with did not have such a fortunate fate: it crashed nose-first into the ground, killing all 154 people on board . It was the deadliest civil aviation accident in Brazil at the time.
The collision prompted investigations by the Brazilian military and by U.S. transportation safety investigators. Both blamed air traffic controllers, but never fully discovered who was to blame or why the planes were flying at the same altitude.
Mr Sharkey was writing the weekly ‘On the Road’ column for the business travel pages of The Times when he submitted a vivid personal account of the collision. It put him on the front page the following Tuesday under the headline “Collision with Death at 37,000 Feet and Alive.”
“Without warning I felt a tremendous jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence except for the hum of the engines,” Mr Sharkey wrote. “And then the three words I will never forget. “We got hit,” said Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing in the aisle near the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 plane.
He added: “The sky was clear; the sun low in the sky. The rainforest lasted forever. But there, at the end of the wing, was a jagged edge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot wing should have been.
“And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life,” he continued. “Over the next few days I was told again and again that no one ever survives a mid-air collision. I was lucky to be alive.” Only later did he learn that everyone on board the Boeing 737 had died.
“I thought about my family,” he wrote. “There was no point in picking up my cell phone to try to make a call; there was no signal. And as our hopes sank, some of us wrote notes for spouses and loved ones and put them in our wallets, hoping the notes would be found later.”
Among his fellow passengers were executives from Embraer, the Brazilian manufacturer of the plane, and from ExcelAire, the charter company that transported the plane to its home base on Long Island.
Mr. Sharkey’s weekly columns, filled with personal insights, were popular for offering practical strategies to make business travel easier, regardless of mode of transportation.
He compared the benefits of taking Amtrak to those of booking short flights in the Northeast Corridor; reported that more and more companies on a budget were letting their employees share hotel rooms; wrote about cruise ship lines’ efforts to attract business travelers; and provided tips on how to get through airport security.
“Although Sharkey’s columns are more interested in the functional mechanics of air travel,” wrote Christopher Schaberg in “The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight” (2012), “his recourse to literary forms is telling: Sharkey casts the airport as a textual space, a performance site that calls for interpretation.”
Joseph Michael Sharkey was born on October 15, 1946 in Philadelphia. His mother, Marcella (Welch) Sharkey, was a supervisor for JC Penny. His father, Joseph C. Sharkey, was a shift leader for the Philadelphia Electric Company and a consultant for the company’s nuclear power plant.
Joe attended Pennsylvania State University, majoring in English. He was the first in his family to attend college, but due to lack of funds he did not graduate. Instead, he enlisted in the Navy. After appealing to the base chaplain during basic training for a transfer to a job less dangerous than catching the tailhook of planes landing on an aircraft carrier, he was assigned as a journalist to the Navy News Service in Vietnam.
His marriage to Carolynne White ended in divorce in 1982. He married Nancy J. Albaugh in 1985. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his children from his first marriage, Dr. Caroline N. Sharkey, Lisa Stone and Christopher Sharkey; his siblings, Eileen O’Hara, Susan Palmer and Thomas, Edward and Michael Sharkey; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Sharkey was a reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer; the executive city editor of The Times-Union in Albany, NY; and assistant national editor of The Wall Street Journal.
He wrote a weekly ‘Jersey’ column for The Times for three years before launching his business travel column in 1999, which he wrote for 16 years until his retirement in 2015. He continued to write a business travel column. column online.
Mr. Sharkey was also the author of a novel and five nonfiction crime books, one of which, “Above Suspicion: An Undercover FBI Agent, an Illicit Affair, and a Murder of Passion” (1993), was adapted into a film that was released in 1993. 2021.