It was summer; it was winter.

So starts my favourite Esquire article. It profiles SwissAir Flight 111, the MD-11 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia, on September 2nd, 1998. The article follows a few of the 229 passengers—how they came to be on board the flight, and how the crash and its aftermath affected their families.

The plane had hit the water at more than four hundred miles per hour, nose first, two engines still firing, very unusual, extremely rare; the jet was two hundred feet long, and the tail rammed straight into the nose, everything exploding into more than one million pieces.

You can read it here.

There’s a split-boulder monument to those aboard on the shores of Peggy’s Cove. It reads, in part:

…They have been joined to the sea and sky. May they rest in peace.