'That is chance. That is not fate.'

By SHERYL STOLBERG

July 26, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ABOARD TWA FLIGHT 800 — Like a thick fog, the memory hung in the air, unspoken, but impossible to ignore--conjuring up thoughts no one wanted to think.

This was no ordinary flight to Paris.

It was Wednesday night, one week after a jumbo jet bearing this same flight number exploded into a fireball off the coast near East Moriches, N.Y. Bodies were still being dragged up from the ocean floor. Investigators were still picking apart rubble, searching for clues to the cause.

Up in the air, 37,000 feet above the Atlantic, there was another kind of searching going on. “Even if you don’t want to think about it, you have to,” said 24-year-old Raphael Boulot, on his way to Paris to see his parents.

Dorothy Bolotin and her brother-in-law, Leon Bolotin, were engaged in an intense discussion about the difference between fate and chance. She is 80 years old. He is 76. They come from the small community of Sharon, Pa., on the other side of the state from Montoursville, the town that lost 16 members of its high school French club and five chaperons in the crash.

The Bolotins and their respective spouses were joined on the flight by another couple, a doctor and his wife. The six were off on a quick weekend getaway. Had the doctor not been on call last week, they would have been on the other Flight 800.

“So what do you think?” Dorothy Bolotin asked her brother-in-law. “Is that chance or is that fate?”

“Chance, of course,” the brother-in-law replied. “That is chance. That is not fate. I don’t believe in fate.”

The six were thinking about their vacation, a trip that came courtesy of Trans World Airlines. Last year, they had been given free tickets after volunteering to give up their seats on a flight to Lisbon. Their Parisian agenda was all set: a trip to the Louvre, a walking tour of the world’s most beautiful city, maybe a visit to Monet’s home at Giverny. But there was a thought Dorothy Bolotin could not get out of her mind.

“You mourn for all those people who went through that terrible tragedy,” she said. “I look at all these kids who are on this plane, good-looking kids. . . . “

Her voice drifted off. There was nothing more to say.

The plane was wide and clean, seven seats across, alternating red and blue. It was a 747, capacity 431. It was less than half full, although the airline would not give an official count. It is long-standing TWA policy, the head flight attendant said, that the crew does not speak to the press in the wake of “an incident.” Thirty-five TWA employees died in last week’s accident. The edict was not violated.

Flying time was six hours and five minutes at an altitude of 37,000 feet. The takeoff, scheduled for 7 p.m., was delayed by an hour and 45 minutes. It was not lost on these passengers that the downed plane, too, had been delayed.

The wait was agonizing. Various reasons were offered. A connecting flight had been delayed. The baggage claim tickets of four passengers from Detroit needed to be double-checked.

Some of the grieving families, French nationals who had come to New York to identify the bodies of victims of last week’s tragedy, were now going home. They boarded the plane late.

That was the only overt reference to last week’s disaster. But there was another sign: On their uniforms, the flight crew had pinned little white ribbons in honor of the dead. One wore a yellow mum.

At 8:04 p.m., with the plane still on the ground, the captain spoke to the passengers.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, apologetically, “you’re not going to believe this. We have a passenger who did not show up for the flight, a Los Angeles connector, and so we are going to take that bag off the flight. It will take a few minutes--more than a few minutes, probably 10. We know where all the bags are. Sorry for the delay.”

The silence was palpable. A bag on board without a passenger attached? What did that mean?

At 8:22 p.m., the captain spoke again. The bag had been removed. There was a collective sigh of relief.

The passengers on this flight, as had been said of those on the flight a week ago, were everyone and no one: A chemist, Canadian by birth, who has lived in Paris for 20 years. A young Frenchwoman, a nursing student in Paris, who had gone to Key West, Fla., on vacation. The owner of a Boston biotechnical firm, on his way to visit his corporate partners. A Denver couple--he a retired music professor, she a seminary student--about to celebrate their second wedding anniversary.

“You try to be fatalistic,” said the seminary student, 49-year-old Elyn Aviva. She and her husband were on their way to France and Spain to follow medieval Christian pilgrimage roads, with hopes of writing a book about their excursion.

“It is what it is,” Aviva said. “It’s all a journey, and you don’t know what your destination is.” Then, in a less philosophical moment, she added: “But you hope you get to Paris.”

Sixteen-year-old Travis Roth of Laramie, Wyo., has some experience with plane crashes. He survived one seven years ago.

It was a United flight from Denver to Chicago. The disabled plane cartwheeled as it attempted to land at Sioux City, Iowa, splitting in two. Travis and his brother and sister, who had been traveling without their parents, walked out of a gaping hole in the fuselage and into a cornfield, all of them unscathed. They were among 189 survivors of a crash that claimed 112 lives.

On Wednesday, headed for Paris to spend a month with a French friend, Travis was unworried. “Being in a plane crash,” he said, “never happens twice.”

This was a common theme aboard Wednesday’s Flight 800, a thread people used to comfort themselves. Lightning does not strike twice. “This may sound calculating,” said Norma Harrington, a 66-year-old grandmother from San Francisco, “but I actually feel this is the safest possible flight to be on.”

Inevitably, though, there was reassuring to be done. Stephane Thomaschot was going home after two weeks of teaching violin bow-making at Oberlin College in Ohio. “My wife is worried a lot,” he said. “But myself, I’m fine.”

The flight finally took off at 8:46 p.m. The perfunctory ritual of reviewing safety procedures no longer felt perfunctory. The sterile female voice, devoid of any accent--so often regarded as mere background noise--suddenly made people sit up and pay attention. The script was the same as always but somehow more compelling.

“If the cabin pressure changes suddenly, the compartment above your head will open. . . . A life vest is in a container under your seat. To use the life vest, open the plastic bag by pulling the peel tab.”

Dinner was beef or chicken. The wine and booze were free. Dorothy Bolotin downed two mini bottles of J&B; Scotch and quickly fell asleep. The in-flight entertainment was “The Birdcage,” and before that, a rerun of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”--the episode where the annoying Ted Baxter marries his baby-voiced girlfriend in Mary’s apartment.

The mood lightened noticeably as the flight progressed. Neighbors chatted, sharing the kind of where-are-you-from, what-do-you-do talk that binds strangers who are trapped together for six hours. Casual conversation did not include talk of the crash.

“We don’t think about it so much,” said Unni Naro Orten, on her way home to Oslo with her husband and three children after a two-week vacation at Disneyland. “Or maybe we think about it, but we never mention it to each other.”

Some people watched the movie. More than a few slipped to the back of the plane, taking advantage of row after row of empty seats to stretch out and sleep.

The plane flew into a spectacular sunrise, glowing orange and red like a scene from an Impressionist canvas.

At 1:45 a.m. EDT--7:45 a.m. in Paris--the crew handed out breakfast: orange juice, yogurt, a tiny muffin and coffee or tea. Weary travelers began awakening, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

It had been, they agreed, a lovely, uneventful flight. The passengers clapped when the flight landed. Said Dorothy Bolotin: “Not even a bump.”