Settled into their charter flight — a short jaunt down to Raleigh, N.C., on this day — the New York Rangers are expertly killing time.



At each of two card tables, which seat four, are seven fellows. The arrangement leaves a half-dozen standing in the aisle.



Nothing unusual there.



Till the plane, with zero warning, plunges and plunges hard.



“We must’ve hit something and we took a nosedive,” Cam Talbot recalled of the March 2014 trip. “We all thought we were going down. There was no announcement, no nothing. All of a sudden, we just nosedived.”



Talbot, one of the guys lingering between the card tables, ends up toppling to the floor. A panicky passenger at the best of times, he’s scrambling, desperately trying to latch onto something solid.



The first thing he grabs is the armrest of the seat occupied by Martin St. Louis, only to have the star forward actually pry off his hand. “To...