You send over a bunch of pizzas.
You cater lunch.
You show up to let people know you’re there, if they want to talk.
Sometimes, you even make a U-turn at the gate, just because someone you know needs a hug.
Be it in government, the news business or the airline industry, the District of Columbia is the biggest small town in America for the people who make their paychecks there.
Everybody knows everybody.
Which is why Frank Fumich got in his car and drove to Reagan International Airport on Wednesday night, at the same time all those rescue boats were scrambling for the Potomac River.
An American Airlines flight returning from Kansas collided mid-air with a military helicopter on a routine training mission, sending both crafts on a wrenching plummet to the frigid, dark waters below.
Passengers on the plane included an elite handful of U.S. figure skaters with Olympic aspirations.
“I was hoping against hope people survived,” Fumich said.
“Then it started becoming painfully clear.”
It became clear that no one lived to tell about it. The airplane passengers, pilots and attendants. The U.S. service members on the copter.
Sixty-seven victims.
Fumich had a connection, courtesy of that aforementioned professional network.
The WVU graduate and northern Virginia native owns and operates a company that provides catered meals and other logistical support to the host of regional carriers that fly in and out of the nation’s capital around the clock.
His company catered the flight that crashed Wednesday night as it took off from Washington earlier, in fact – but he has yet to talk to any of his employees who may have had interaction with the pilots and other staffers who perished on the plane.
“I’m gonna find that out today,” he said Friday morning.
He was also getting ready to send over a catered lunch to American Airlines personnel and others contracted out by the aviation company involved with the plane that went down.
He did that Thursday, also, and he’ll keep doing it for as long as necessary, he said.
“It’s not much,” he said. “But it’s something I can do.”
He stayed until 2 a.m. Thursday, talking and watching the blue lights on the water.
He sent pizzas and other comfort food over to people.
“Everybody’s pretty wrung-out, just because we all work together and see each other,” he said.
One of the people he knows trained one of the attendants working that American Airlines flight. She was emotional as they talked while he was behind the wheel.
Fumich was on his way back home – when he stopped.
“Hey, you need a hug?”
“Yeah, Frank. I really think I do.”
He turned his car around. Drove back. Gave her a hug.
As of Friday morning on the Potomac – a drizzly, Friday morning on the Potomac – more than 40 bodies had been pulled from the water. Others were still entangled in the twisted ruin below the surface.
The previous day, Dean Naujoks did some poignant scavenging on the water, with the permission of law enforcement.
Naujoks routinely makes cruises up and down the Potomac in his role with Watchkeeper Alliance, an environmental outreach group.
He piloted his 21-foot motorboat to the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge, around two miles down from where the plane and the helicopter hit the water after the collision.
A woman’s sweater and pages from a flight manual were among the items he scooped up and turned over to the FBI.
“Everything’s covered in jet fuel,” Naujoks told Associated Press.
“I’m thinking of the people these things belonged to and it’s a punch to the gut. It’s just a sad day on the river.”
