Pensacola hero who saved 55 people from plane crash has died

PENSACOLA, Fla. — When National Airlines Flight 193 crash landed in Escambia Bay on the night of May 8, 1978, the plane had 58 people onboard.

Passengers and crew members hurried out of the sinking Boeing 727 into the dark water alongside leaking fuel. Three people drowned, but the other 55 were saved by the quick work of a Pensacola tugboat captain.

Glenn McDonald, then 41, steered his tugboat to the wreckage and fished survivors out of the water and onto the safety of a small barge towed behind his vessel.

Now, more than four decades later, Pensacola lost one of its all-time heroes when McDonald, 84, died March 22 of heart failure.

His wife, Janet McDonald, told the News Journal that a formal funeral service will not be held. Her husband’s wish was to be buried at sea.

“He always said that he knew he was supposed to be there that night,” she recalled. “He was where he was meant to be.”

Still, for the rest of his life, Glenn McDonald could never let go of the memory of the three lives he was unable to save from the dark water, his wife said.

Glenn McDonald was born on Dec. 7, 1936, at the old Sacred Heart Hospital on 12th Avenue in Pensacola. He met Janet for the first time when he was in eighth grade. She was a seventh grader, and he put a bug down the back of his future love’s shirt.

The young couple remained sweethearts through their high school years and continued to date as underclassmen in college. She attended Florida State University, and Glenn studied science at the University of Southern Mississippi. The long distance took its toll.

“We were still going together in college, but then, we broke up,” Janet recalled. “I married an Air Force pilot, and he married a beauty queen from Mississippi.”

Glenn had a daughter, Felecia Wynn, with his first wife, and Janet had two daughters with her first husband.

But within a decade of their first marriages, they both got divorces. By about 1963, they had both moved back to their hometown of Pensacola, where the former high school sweethearts reconnected.

They married in 1965, and Glenn legally adopted both of Janet’s daughters — Jennifer McDonald Cochran and Jeromee McDonald Beaudette — from her previous marriage.

“He was my own hero,” Beaudette said, before briefly pausing as the tears started to fall. “He was always there for us when we needed him. No questions asked.”

After Glenn and Janet married, he started teaching scuba diving lessons before embarking on his next venture. Then he bought a barge, a crane and a small tugboat and opened his own underwater construction company.

The night of the plane crash, Glenn called home to tell Janet that he’d be working late. An important client called. Their need was urgent, and the job would require Glenn to transport his crane across the bay on his barge and to be ready to work at first light.

The crewmen who worked for Glenn had all gone home, except for his first mate on the tugboat, Bill Kenny, who agreed to help his boss with the nighttime job. The two men pushed off the dock in the tugboat and together motored out into a dense fog.

Guiding the boat by compass, Glenn went off course. It took quite some time to eventually emerge from the fog and finally regain his bearings.

Although Glenn was nowhere near where he was heading, he was where he needed to be that night.

The Boeing 727 came down out of the clouds and crashed less than 100 yards from the tugboat.