Joe Sharkey, who delivered pragmatic recommendation to enterprise vacationers in a whole lot of columns in The New York Occasions solely to search out himself at the focus of a harrowing catastrophe in 2006, when the manager jet through which he was flying collided with a Boeing 737 over Brazil, died on Nov. 6 at his residence in Tucson, Ariz. He was 77.
The trigger was a hypertensive stroke, stated his spouse, Nancy Sharkey, a retired Occasions editor.
Mr. Sharkey was returning residence from a contract project for Enterprise Jet Traveler journal on Sept. 29, 2006, a Friday, when the jetliner clipped a wing and the tail of the Embraer Legacy 600 that was carrying him, 4 different passengers and a two-man crew at 37,000 ft over the Amazon rainforest.
The manager jet managed to land safely at a distant navy airport, however the Gol Linhas Aéreas industrial airliner it collided with didn’t have such a lucky destiny: It nose-dived to the bottom, killing all 154 folks on board. It was the deadliest civilian aviation accident in Brazil on the time.
The collision prompted inquiries by Brazil’s navy and by American transportation security investigators. Each positioned blame on air visitors controllers however by no means totally resolved who was at fault or why the planes had been flying on the identical altitude.
Mr. Sharkey had been writing the weekly “On the Street” column for The Occasions’s business-travel pages when he turned in a vivid first-person account of the collision. It vaulted him onto the entrance web page the next Tuesday underneath the headline “Colliding With Demise at 37,000 Ft, and Dwelling.”
“With out warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, adopted by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines,” Mr. Sharkey wrote. “After which the three phrases I’ll always remember. ‘We’ve been hit,’ stated Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing within the aisle close to the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet.”
He added: “The sky was clear; the solar low within the sky. The rainforest went on eternally. However there, on the finish of the wing, was a jagged ridge, maybe a foot excessive, the place the five-foot-tall winglet was speculated to be.
“And so started essentially the most harrowing half-hour of my life,” he continued. “I might be informed repeatedly within the subsequent few days that no person ever survives a midair collision. I used to be fortunate to be alive.” Solely later did he be taught that everybody aboard the Boeing 737 had died.
“I considered my household,” he wrote. “There was no level reaching for my cellphone to attempt a name — there was no sign. And as our hopes sank with the solar, a few of us jotted notes to spouses and family members and positioned them in our wallets, hoping the notes would later be discovered.”
His fellow passengers included executives from Embraer, the Brazilian producer of the airplane, in addition to ExcelAire, the constitution firm that was ferrying the plane to its residence base on Lengthy Island.
Mr. Sharkey’s weekly columns, stuffed with private insights, had been standard for providing sensible methods to make enterprise journey, by any technique of transportation, extra handy.
He in contrast the benefits of taking Amtrak with these of reserving brief flights within the Northeast Hall; reported that extra budget-strapped corporations had been making staff share resort rooms; wrote about efforts by cruise ship strains to woo enterprise vacationers; and gave tips about learn how to breeze by airport safety.
“Even whereas Sharkey’s columns are extra within the useful operations of air journey,” Christopher Schaberg wrote in “The Textual Lifetime of Airports: Studying the Tradition of Flight” (2012), “his recourse to literary type is telling: Sharkey casts the airport as a textual area, a efficiency website that calls for to be interpreted.”
Joseph Michael Sharkey was born on Oct. 15, 1946, in Philadelphia. His mom, Marcella (Welch) Sharkey, was a supervisor for J.C. Penney. His father, Joseph C. Sharkey, was a shift supervisor for the Philadelphia Electrical Firm and a guide to the corporate’s nuclear energy plant.
Joe attended Pennsylvania State College, majoring in English. He was the primary in his household to attend faculty, however, in need of cash, he didn’t graduate. As a substitute, he enlisted within the Navy. After interesting to the bottom chaplain throughout primary coaching for a switch to a much less perilous job than catching the tailhook of planes touchdown on an plane provider, he was assigned as a journalist to the Navy Information Service in Vietnam.
His marriage to Carolynne White led to divorce in 1982. He married Nancy J. Albaugh in 1985. Along with his spouse, he’s survived by his youngsters 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; 5 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Earlier than becoming a member of The Occasions, Mr. Sharkey was a reporter and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer; the manager metropolis editor of The Occasions-Union in Albany, N.Y.; and an assistant nationwide editor of The Wall Road Journal.
He wrote a weekly “Jersey” column for 3 years for The Occasions earlier than launching his business-travel column in 1999, which he wrote for 16 years till he retired in 2015. He continued to put in writing a column on-line.
Mr. Sharkey was additionally the writer of a novel and 5 nonfiction crime books, considered one of which, “Above Suspicion: An Undercover FBI Agent, an Illicit Affair, and a Homicide of Ardour” (1993), was tailored into a movie launched in 2021.