The intensity of the blue-white light seared the pilot's eyes. It was like looking directly at the sun, but worse, and the pain made his hands come off the controls to his face, and he screamed into the intercom phones. The copilot had been looking off-axis to the flash, but the human eye is drawn to light, especially in darkness, and his mind didn't have time to warn him off from the entirely normal reaction. Both airmen were blinded and in pain, with their aircraft eight hundred feet off the ground and a mile from the landing threshold. Both were highly trained men, and highly skilled as well. His eyes still shut from the pain, the pilot's hands reached down to find the yoke and tried to steady it. The copilot did exactly the same thing, but their control movements were not quite the same, and in an instant they were fighting each other rather than the aircraft. They were both also entirely without visual references, and the viciously instant disorientation caused vertigo in both men that was necessarily different. One airman thought their aircraft was veering in one direction, and the other tried to yank the controls to correct a different movement, and with only eight hundred feet of air under them, there wasn't time to decide who was right and the fighting on the yoke only meant that when the stronger of the two got control, his efforts doomed them all. The E-767 rolled ninety degrees to the right, veering north toward empty manufacturing buildings, falling rapidly as it did so. The tower controllers shouted into the radio, but the aviators didn't even hear the warnings.

The pilot's last action was to reach for the go-around button on the throttle in a despairing attempt to get his bird safely back in the sky. His hand had hardly found it when his senses told him, a second early, that his life was over. His last thought was that a nuclear bomb had gone off over his country again.

"Jesucristo," Chavez whispered. Just a second, not even that. The nose of the aircraft flared in the dusky sky as though from some sort of explosion, and then the thing had just veered off to the north like a dying bird. He forced himself to look away from the impact area. He just didn't want to see or know where it hit. Not that it mattered. The towering fireball lit up the area as though from a lightning strike. It hit Ding like a punch in the stomach to realize what he'd done, and there came the sudden urge to vomit.