Keith Meyers, AS '77, is known around The New York Times photo desk by the moniker "Air, Land and Sea.''

Meyers, a senior photographer for the Times, has had ejection-seat training on U.S. military jets. He's captained his own boat through New York Harbor. He's a seasoned scuba diver and underwater photographer. He was transmitting photos through his cell phone back in 1995.

A hurricane he was covering flattened his hotel and left him sleeping in a plastic pool chair for a week. When the rest of us were learning the word "meltdown" for the first time, Meyers was walking around Three Mile Island with a malfunctioning government-issue Geiger counter. He was the first news photographer in the world to fly over the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.

Jim Wilson, who has worked with him for the last 23 years, says incredible things just happen to Meyers.

"One time we were out in New York Harbor fishing with Keith,'' Wilson says. "He has all these electronics on his boat, and he says he sees this really huge thing and we have to get to it. He starts moving the boat, and then, all of a sudden, we see the surface of the water shimmering. A nuclear submarine came out of the water just like it does in the movies. I see this enormous wake coming at us. Stuff like that just happens to Keith much more than anyone else I've ever worked with."

Meyers says a photo subject once stuck a gun to his head and played Russian roulette with him. When he covered Hurricane Andrew, he had to travel 40 miles north to the nearest gas station, and his rental car's tires succumbed to debris in the road. But, Meyers says his scariest shoot was Three Mile Island, when he thought his life and the lives of his entire family back home were on the line.

"It was an end-of-the-world-scenario feeling,'' he says. "It reminded me of the Godzilla movie where Raymond Burr was sitting on the hill when Godzilla breaks through the power line."

When his co-workers describe Meyers, they favor adjectives like "decent" and "helpful."

"One of the nice things about Keith is he's a very genuine person in a very, very competitive industry,'" says Times photographer Fred Conrad.

"Keith is very hardworking and he's an extremely decent man," Wilson says. "He will really go out of his way to help people. He ended up teaching the vast majority of the staff how to be digital photographers."

Reporter Francis X. Clines remembers asking Meyers to take a picture of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley's grave for a story he was writing: "He had a bad back, but I didn't know it. To get a picture of the flat gravestone, to get the right angle, he had to be up high. So, he moved around all kinds of picnic tables, and I think he put a trash can on top of a picnic table and climbed up--all this with his bad back. He's that kind of a photographer. He'll do anything to get the picture right."

Meyers, who attended the University in installments between 1966 and 1977, worked as a reporter and photographer for several small papers in Delaware and Maryland and as a stringer for The Philadelphia Inquirer before landing at the Times' photo desk.

"I think because of his background of having been a reporter before being a photographer, he maintains contacts with his sources and that really pays off," Conrad says. "He's personable, and he talks to people very, very well. If you're going to be in a disaster, you want to be next to Keith, because, at least, you're going to find the best restaurant that's still open."

Meyers was able to hitch a ride on a French jet flying over the Statue of Liberty for its bicentennial celebration.

"He took an incredible picture of these French
jets in formation right above the Statue of Liberty," Conrad says. "Everybody looked at that picture and said, "How'd he get it?' Thousands of photographers there from all over the world, and he had the picture. The reason he got that picture is he had the foresight and tenacity to get certified years before with the U.S. military. So he could say, 'Look, I've got a certificate. You don't have to worry about me throwing up in the back seat.'"

When Meyers asked the U.S. Coast Guard to let him join a helicopter flight over the World Trade Center ruins while it was still smoking, they knew him.

"The bottom line is they trusted me," Meyers says. "They knew that I had my captain's license. They knew that I wasn't going to break their security zones. I never played games with them."

The short trip resulted in the now-famous aerial shot of downtown Manhattan still burning. It was Meyers' contribution to a 20-photograph staff portfolio that snared a Pulitzer for The New York Times.

His favorite lifetime assignment was documenting the training of the Challenger crew.

He rode with them in the padded interior of the "Vomit Comet," a jet that soared into parabolic loops and reached zero gravity. He has a favorite photograph of teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe. He was floating when he shot it.

He turned away at the moment when the Challenger exploded. He calls it one of the worst moments of his life.

"For six or seven months, I spent more time with them than I did with my own family," he says. "You just couldn't even believe it happened. It was like you're looking at it and yet it's hard to fathom that it actually happened."

Meyers has covered presidential elections, the Crown Heights riots, national disasters and a papal visit to Newark, N.J.

"I'm just very lucky,'' he says. "I've got a job I really enjoy and I work for a great newspaper and I'm glad to be part of that team."

Meyers lives in Oceanport, N.J. His wife, Gerry, AS '70, runs a conservation and picture framing business.

--Kathy Canavan