“Any time,” Mr. Paladino, said with an anxious smile.

Later that night they gave us cold beer and food at the military base. We speculated endlessly about what had caused the impact. A wayward weather balloon? A hot-dogging military fighter jet whose pilot had bailed? An airliner somewhere nearby that had blown up, and rained debris on us?

Whatever the cause, it had become clear that we had been involved in an actual midair crash that none of us should have survived.

In a moment of gallows humor at the dormlike barracks where we were to sleep, I said, “Maybe we are all actually dead, and this is hell — reliving college bull sessions with a can of beer for eternity.”

About 7.30 p.m. Dan Bachmann, an Embraer executive and the only one among us who spoke Portuguese, came to the table in the mess hall with news from the commander’s office. A Boeing 737 with 155 people on board was reported missing right where we had been hit.

Before that moment, we had all been bonding, joking about our close call. We were the Amazon Seven, living now on precious time that no longer belonged to us but somehow we had acquired. We would have a reunion each year and report on how we used our time.

Instead we now bowed our heads in a long moment of silence, with the sound of muffled tears.

Both pilots, experienced corporate jet pilots, were shaken by the ordeal. “If anybody should have gone down it should have been us,” Mr. Lepore, 42, of Bay Shore, N.Y., kept saying.

Mr. Paladino, 34, of Westhampton, N.Y., was barely able to speak. “I’m just trying to settle in with the loss of all those people. It is really starting to hurt,” he said.