The Gulfstream II turbojet was cruising at 41,000 feet through one of the nation's busiest air corridors when the electrical system failed, the radios went dead and the lights went out.

Actor John Travolta, an accomplished pilot who had purchased the $5 million-dollar jet just nine months earlier from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was at the controls.

Asleep in the cabin were six passengers, including Travolta's wife and their 7-month-old son, Jett.

Faced with the catastrophic failure of his aircraft's entire electrical system, Travolta pointed the nose of the jet at the glow of Washington, D.C., barely visible through a thick layer of clouds and, with the help of his co-pilot, began an emergency descent, navigating only by flashlight and a tiny magnetic compass.

Air traffic controllers briefly suspended flight operations at four major airports Washington National, Dulles, Baltimore-Washington International and Andrews Air Force Base - until they could determine where the jet would attempt to land.

Then, in a spectacularly risky maneuver, controllers diverted a USAir Boeing 727 with 182 aboard, hoping to link up with Travolta's crippled Gulfstream and lead it through the clouds to safety.

What resulted was a near mid-air collision.

The Gulfstream broke through the bottom of the clouds at 1,000 feet, the crew spotted the Washington monument and made a high speed emergency landing at Washington National, blowing four tires and closing the airport for nearly four hours on one of the busiest travel weeks of the year.

The incident occurred just before Thanksgiving, on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 1992.

The general public has never heard details of the episode, although the National Transportation Safety Board, which typically does not investigate near-collisions but was sufficiently alarmed by the Travolta incident to do so, concluded that "the threat of a mid-air collision was very real."

Travolta, nominated for a Best Actor Oscar at tonight's Academy Awards ceremony for his performance in Pulp Fiction, declined to discuss the flight when contacted through friends. The Federal Aviation Administration can't confirm that it happened.

This account is based on NTSB records obtained by The Orlando Sentinel; documents from the Gulfstream's manufacturer, which conducted its own investigation; and interviews with air-traffic control personnel and others privy to the events of that night.

Travolta no rookie pilot

John Joseph Travolta, then 38, was flying family and friends from Fort Lauderdale to Rockland, Maine, for a Thanksgiving celebration at his island vacation home on Penobscot Bay. Cruising at nearly 460 knots, the flight had departed Florida about 8:30 p.m. and was due in Maine at 11.

Travolta was no novice pilot. He'd been flying since 1978, had more than 3,000 hours in his logbook, and boasted of holding seven different jet licenses. He owns a home in Central Florida, in the posh aviation community of Spruce Creek, just south of Port Orange.

After the holidays, the actor was scheduled to begin work on Look Who's Talking 3, a movie about a talking dog. Fourteen months earlier, he'd married actress Kelly Preston in Paris, where they'd worked together on The Tender, another film.

Below, a solid layer of clouds stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see.

John Messina, a flying partner of Travolta's, occupied the right seat. According to three aviation sources, Messina regularly flew as co-pilot of the Gulfstream "to watch over" Travolta and "keep him out of trouble."

About 10:15 p.m., a small bearing in the turbojet's left electrical generator failed. The aircraft switched to a second generator on the right engine, but a resulting power surge tripped the circuit breaker, and the generator shut down.

A series of warning lights, which should have alerted the crew, failed to illuminate.

Like an automobile, an aircraft without a generator will continue to operate. However, without the generator to produce power for such things as radios and navigational gear, the airplane must rely on two nickel cadmium batteries which, even when fresh, won't sustain the Gulfstream's many operational systems for more than five minutes.

By the time Travolta and Messina recognized the dual generator failure, several minutes had passed, and the aircraft's control panel was beginning to dim.

The crew attempted to activate an instrument known as a transformer rectifier that could have provided an alternate source of emergency power.

It also malfunctioned.

Travolta notified controllers of his emergency, then the cockpit went totally dark.

Gulfstream N728T was nearly eight miles high, and was approaching one of the nation's busiest air corridors with no communications, no functioning navigational equipment, and no exterior lights.

The turbojet's transponder, which communicates with the FAA radar, also ceased operation.

So N728T was reduced to nothing more than an unidentified blip on the air traffic control radar screen. Controllers were able only to guess at what altitude the Gulfstream was flying.

What happened next was perhaps the most worrisome element of the Travolta episode.

An air traffic controller contacted the pilot of USAir flight 1729, out of Charlotte, headed for New York with 182 aboard, cruising at 400 miles an hour at 21,000 feet. The controller asked the pilot to help find the Gulfstream, flying at the same speed at an unknown altitude.

"I know it will be hard to see him," the controller radioed.

"He has no electrical system, so he won't be lit up."

In fact, on the moonless night, Travolta's turbojet would have been practically invisible.

The controller who handled the emergency was reprimanded and later reassigned. The FAA would not release his name.

Record of incident purged

A computer search at the FAA's Department of Air Traffic Systems Effectiveness in Washington, D.C., failed to produce any documentation of the incident.

"It would appear the records have been purged from the system," said Bob Hoppers, an FAA spokesman in Oklahoma City. "Somehow they got tossed."

A "safety recommendation report" by the National Transportation Safety Board appears to be the only surviving record. The six-page report to FAA Administrator David R. Hinson, dated Feb. 14, 1994, spells out what happened, based on tape recordings of tower-to-pilot conversations.