Missing a Northwest Airlines flight out of Las Vegas on Thursday didn't stop Kim Passariello from trying to reach his father's bedside at St. Mary's Hospital in Saginaw, Mich.

Mr. Passariello, 41, booked an alternate flight to Detroit, connecting through Cincinnati on Comair 3272.

''He desperately tried to get here before his father's surgery and that's the only way he could make connections,'' said Ursula Martin of Livonia, Mich., an aunt who was waiting to drive her nephew to Saginaw when his plane crashed.

The last she heard from Mr. Passariello, a self-employed carpenter who moved from Saginaw to Lake Havasu, Ariz., 15 years ago, was a message he left on her answering machine at 2:11 p.m. Thursday.

''My dad didn't even know he was coming,'' said Mr. Passariello's younger sister, Sheryl Cergunal, struggling to suppress her grief Friday as her father, John Passariello, underwent bypass surgery.

''He kept asking for him but the surgeon didn't think we should tell him,'' said Mrs. Martin. ''He would not have survived that shock.''

A divorced father of four daughters and grandfather of two , Kim Passariello was engaged to remarry. Arizona's warmth lured him out west.

''He liked the mountains, he was another John Denver,'' Mrs. Martin recalled. ''He was an easy, easygoing happy person.

''It's just totally unbelievable.''