Reba McEntire had bronchitis, so she stayed an extra night in San Diego. Everybody who boarded the first plane without her died. It was 16 March 1991. The band had played a private corporate show that evening and were due in Fort Wayne, Indiana the next night, so two chartered jets were waiting at a small airfield to take them east. McEntire stayed behind with her husband and her stylist to sleep off the illness. The rest of them went. At about a quarter to two in the morning the first aircraft flew into the side of Otay Mountain, ten miles from the runway it had left. Nobody on board survived. She lost seven musicians, her tour manager and both pilots in the space of a few seconds. She was 35 and had spent most of her adult life on a bus with them. Kirk Cappello was her bandleader and Paula Kaye Evans sang with her. Chris Austin, Michael Thomas, Terry Jackson, Tony Saputo, Joey Cigainero and Jim Hammon were the rest of the people she had been living on a bus with for years. She has said she did not know whether she could carry on at all, and country music closed around her. Dolly Parton rang and offered to lend her own band. Vince Gill rang and said he would stand on stage beside her for as long as it took. She went back to work with new musicians instead. In October that year, seven months after the crash, she released an album called For My Broken Heart and dedicated it to them. It became the biggest seller of her career. In the sleeve notes she wrote that she hoped the songs would be a form of healing for all our broken hearts. She is 70 now. She still gets asked about that night, and she still cannot get through the answer. theboot.com/reba-mcentire-ba…