An 8:52 a.m. trip.   Tuesday, January 24.   Weather clear.

A RIOC surveillance tape would later show that more than two dozen boarded Aerial Tramway Car No.  1, Manhattan-bound.

No babies in strollers, no children, no wheelchairs.

An experienced cabin attendant, Elliot Isaac, veteran of 18 years on the Tramway, secured the straps at the turnstiles, slid the platform barrier gate into place, closed the cabin doors.  Then, at the controls, he did what he had done hundreds of times before to start a trip.

Routine.

Nothing, at the start, to suggest that within minutes there would be a dozen injuries, seconds of chaos and minutes of terror, then news choppers overhead, ambulances, and - in the small way that Roosevelt Island sometimes manages - media attention and history.

Weeks before, there had been special Tram trips, pausing over the East River while operators of a crane helping with repairs of the Queensboro Bridge set limit switches that offered assurance their long reach, sometimes augmented by estuary tides, would stay out of the path of passing Tram cars.  Arrangements were in place for communication - not directly with cabin attendants, but through supervisors - when the huge Summerville crane would be ranging near the very predictable path of the Tramway's cabins.

Tram workers had noticed, days before, that the crane operator must be lifting limit switches, and there had been complaints and discussion to reinforce safety.

Even then, this was a routine trip.

Even with two maintenance workers on tower number 3, greasing the track ropes, and a supervisor in the booth as required when personnel are potentially at risk - a routine trip.

Courtesy Newschannel 4

"There was a bang, like an explosion," one passenger says.  "Then we were all on the floor, the cabin swinging wildly.  I thought we were going to go down." The huge boom of the construction crane had hit the bottom left corner of the leading edge of the cabin, and while the 3,000 horsepower motors of the Tramway continued to pull the cabin toward Manhattan - and Cabin No.  2 toward Roosevelt Island - Cabin No.  1 was retarded in its progress while its overhead hanger arm continued to move.  Then, seconds later, hauled clear of the crane, the cabin swung wildly - "so wildly that I thought it would jump off

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the cables," says an experienced Tramway obsever who has asked to remain unnamed - so wildly that those in the cabin, almost all of whom had been thrown to the floor, elected to stay there even after ordinary impulse told them they might stand again.

The accident is being investigated by New York State, as required by law, and an official report will ultimately be issued.  But some key facts have been established through conversations with informed observers and those at the scene at the time of the collision:

• No Console Operator was on duty at the time of the accident.  Though a supervisor was in the console booth because maintenance workers were on the tower, he was not functioning as a Console Operator - not there to monitor the Tram's proximity to the crane.  Console operators were eliminated by RIOC in the Fall of 1997 in an attempt to economize.

• After the accident, a RIOC spokesperson asserted at first that a Console Operator would not have been able to see the accident, later that there was a Console Operator on duty.  Those familiar with Tramway operation say a Console Operator, functioning in that capacity, would have had a clear view of the accident about to happen.

  Courtesy Channel 7 Eyewitness News

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• The automatic limit switches, set up when the crane operation began, were supposed to keep the crane at least 12 feet from the Tram.  There is speculation, as yet unconfirmed, that the limit switches were not restored after an overnight period of crane activity during Tramway down time.

• A representative of the crane operator has offered to pay medical expenses for at least one injured passenger.

• Two trips prior to the accident, children and wheelchair-bound riders were aboard.

• RIOC President Jerome Blue did not go to the scene of the accident.

• The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation has made no known attempts to contact the passengers who were injured.