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1920s 1930s
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Date / Time: Sunday, January 19, 1930 / 6:23 p.m.
Details and Probable Cause: Among the 14 passengers boarding the TAT (Transcontinental Air Transport)-Maddux Air Lines aircraft, a Ford 5-AT-C Tri-Motor (NC9689), were those who had enjoyed a day of races at the Aqua Caliente Racetrack near Tijuana, Mexico. Designated the “Race Special,” the plane departed Agua Caliente at 5:50 p.m. for its flight north to the Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale.
The Ford Tri-Motor subsequently experienced engine trouble while flying in rain, low clouds and fog along the California coast north of Oceanside and south of San Clemente. The two pilots decided to make an emergency landing in an open bean field on the coastal plain but misjudged the aircraft's height in the poor weather conditions and the airplane’s left wing struck the ground. The Tri-Motor then slammed to earth, slid 200 feet and burst into flames.
All 14 passengers and both pilots were killed in the fiery crash. Among the passenger fatalities was Elizabeth Squibb, 30, a granddaughter of E. R. Squibb, founder of the Squibb Drug Company.
Following the crash, one of the aviation officials subsequently involved in the investigation was Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, chairman of TAT-Maddux’s technical committee, whose activities included making a brief aerial inspection of the crash site from the cockpit of his Lockheed Vega monoplane not long after the tragedy occurred.
The airline involved in the crash was the result of a merger between Transcontinental Air Transport and Los Angeles-based Maddux Airlines. Later, TAT-Maddux would also absorb most of Western Air Express and be renamed Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA).
Still later, in 1950, while under the leadership of multimillionaire Howard Hughes, Transcontinental & Western Air would change its name again, to Trans World Airlines -- thus retaining its previously established “TWA” identity and logo.
One of the “Golden Era” airlines, TWA subsequently suffered a number of setbacks in the post-1978 deregulation years and on January 9, 2001, entered bankruptcy for a third time.
Shortly thereafter it was purchased by and gradually absorbed into American Airlines. The last TWA flight, originating in Honolulu, Hawaii, landed at St. Louis, Missouri, at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, December 2, 2001.
Fatalities: 16 -- all 14 passengers and 2 crew members.
Details and Probable Cause: En route from Burbank’s United Airport to the San Francisco Bay Airdrome at Alameda, the single-engine Lockheed Orion 9 (NC12226) aircraft was carrying a lone pilot and two passengers.
While flying on the southeastern side of San Francisco Bay near Hayward in heavy rain, the Varney Speed Lines monoplane descended out of a low cloud ceiling and sliced through the tops of two houses, smashed into a third, and exploded.
The crash and ensuing firestorm killed all three occupants of the airplane and 11 people on the ground. Among those killed were all six members of the Joseph Arisa family, including both parents and four children ranging in age from 10 years to 18 months, whose home was the aircraft’s main impact point.
Investigators determined that the crash was the result of “an unusual and unforeseen condition of the weather that developed its intensity in the immediate locality of the accident.” Weather reports showed that within a time period of 50 minutes, after the plane had departed Burbank, the cloud ceiling in the San Leandro area dropped from 2,000 to 300 feet.
Varney Speed Lines, a company that started air mail service in the late 1920s as Varney Air Lines, saw its route system greatly reduced in 1929 when its northern division -- from Portland, Oregon, to Spokane, Washington -- was absorbed by United Air Lines.
Undaunted, Varney continued operations and, within five years of the airline’s 1933 San Leandro crash, would evolve into Continental Airlines under the new leadership of pilot Robert F. Six.
Fatalities: 14 -- all 3 aboard the Lockheed Orion; 11 persons on the ground.
Details and Probable Cause: Nine passengers boarded the United Air Lines twin-engine Boeing B-247D airliner (NC13355) in San Francisco for a post-Christmas, evening flight to Burbank’s Union Air Terminal (formerly known as United Airport). Among the travelers were H. S. Teague, 28, a cartoonist at Walt Disney Studios, and Edward T. Ford, a Standard Oil employee and son of the president of the Grace Line Steamship Company, and his wife, Charlotte.
While flying in rain and poor visibility south of Newhall, the aircraft struck a ridge in the Santa Susana Mountains, snapping off its wings. The fuselage continued on, soaring over a ravine before striking the rock wall of a bluff below Oat Mountain and falling over 100 feet into the bottom of Rice Canyon.
Searchers looking for the missing plane in the rugged terrain reached the crash site after being alerted by an area rancher who spotted the wreckage while rounding up stray cows. All 12 persons aboard the aircraft -- nine passengers and three crew members -- had perished in the crash.
Investigators believe the pilot may have lost his bearings and was unable to contact ground stations by radio while flying in the stormy weather.
The aircraft involved in the crash, the Boeing model B-247, was introduced in 1933 and is considered by many to be the first “modern” commercial airliner. However, due to a deal between the then-linked companies of Boeing and United Air Lines, sales of the B-247 to United’s competitors were limited for two years, and the aircraft’s potential was soon eclipsed by the Douglas Aircraft Company’s introduction of the faster, larger “DC” series of commercial airplanes, beginning with the DC-1.
Fatalities: 12
Details and Probable Cause: The Boeing B-247D twin-engine airliner (NC13315), on a flight from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Burbank, was manned by a crew of three and carrying 10 passengers, including famed African explorer and author Martin E. Johnson, 52, who was traveling on a lecture tour with his wife.
While flying in fog and rain the aircraft crashed into Pinetos Peak northeast of San Fernando while on approach to Burbank’s Union Air Terminal. Pilot William L. Lewis, spotting the fog-shrouded ridge seconds before impact, managed to cut the engines and “pancake” the plane onto the rugged hillside.
Following the crash, a 25-year-old passenger, Arthur Robinson, was able to hike five miles down the mountainside, where he encountered rescuers from the Olive View Sanitorium, some of whom had heard the crash and were making their way up toward the accident site.
Only one male passenger was killed outright in the crash, but four more of the plane’s occupants subsequently died of their injuries. Johnson suffered a fractured skull in the crash and died the next day (January 13) in a hospital. Two more male passengers and the plane’s co-pilot, C. T. Owens, died within the week following the accident.
Among the surviving passengers was Robert Andersen, who eventually recovered from numerous broken bones and subsequently became owner-operator of “Pea Soup Andersen’s,” a landmark California roadside dining establishment in Buellton, north of Santa Barbara.
Also surviving the crash was Martin Johnson’s wife and exploration companion, Osa Helen Leighty Johnson, who suffered back and neck injuries but insisted on continuing with the couple’s lecture circuit despite being confined to a wheelchair while recuperating.
She returned to Kenya later the same year to serve as a technical consultant for the filming of the classic movie “Stanley and Livingstone” (1939), starring Spencer Tracy, Cedric Hardwicke, Nancy Kelly and Walter Brennan. She later also wrote two popular books on her globetrotting adventures with her husband: I Married Adventure and Bride in the Solomons.
The Western Air Express accident occurred less than three weeks after a United Air Lines crash in the same general area killed 12 persons (see entry above).
The cause of this latest crash was attributed to the adverse weather conditions, coupled with the pilot’s decision to descend to a dangerously low altitude without positive knowledge of his position.
Fatalities: 5 -- 4 passengers (of 10) and 1 of 3 crew members.
Details and Probable Cause: The United Air Lines aircraft, a twin-engine Douglas DC-3A-197 (NC16073), was nearing the end of its flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco and carrying eight passengers and a crew of three.
While flying in clear weather and descending on a routine nighttime approach to Mills Field (today’s San Francisco International Airport), the DC-3 inexplicably continued its 45-degree descent until it crashed into the waters of San Francisco Bay approximately 1-1/4 miles from the airfield. All 11 persons on board were killed in the crash; some of the victims’ bodies were never recovered.
Investigators were able to salvage and examine the wreckage, but the plane’s unexplained dive remained a mystery and the cause of the crash was thought to be pilot error.
However, five weeks after the accident, an American Airlines DC-3 was on its takeoff roll at Newark, New Jersey, when its pilot found that the aircraft’s controls had jammed. He was able to safely abort the takeoff, and a closer examination of the jammed controls revealed that the co-pilot’s radio microphone had fallen off its hook and become wedged in a small, "V"-shaped recess at the base of the control yoke. When the pilot pried the microphone loose, the aircraft’s controls once again operated normally.
Details of the Newark near-disaster were relayed to the investigators still probing the San Francisco accident, and the officials took another look at the wreckage. There, amid the tangled debris of the cockpit, they discovered the United co-pilot’s microphone still wedged in the recess at the base of the yoke. The Douglas Aircraft Company notified all DC-3 operators of the problem and a rubber boot was installed over the recess, a solution to prevent any similar accidents from occurring.
The United Air Lines crash at San Francisco was the first fatal accident involving the legendary Douglas DC-3, which entered commercial airline service in 1936.
Fatalities: 11 -- all 8 passengers and the crew of 3.
Details and Probable Cause: The twin-engine TWA Douglas DC-2-112 airliner (NC13789) departed San Francisco on an evening flight to Burbank with six passengers and a crew of three on board.
Two hours into its flight the plane began encountering a weather front that was building into what would become the severest storm on the West Coast in 64 years -- a four-day deluge that would cause over 120 deaths and massive flood damage in the Southern California region. The aircraft’s pilot, John D. Graves, radioed that ice was forming on the DC-2’s wings as it neared the Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield and that he was turning back north to land at Fresno.
The last transmission heard from the plane was at 9:28 p.m. when Graves requested a current weather report. When the plane failed to land at Fresno an extensive search was launched, focusing on the nearby Shaver Lake-Huntington Lake area of the snow-covered Sierra Nevada northeast of the city. Yet no trace of the airliner was found, despite a $1,000 reward offered by TWA officials to anyone who could locate the missing aircraft.
Over three months later, a determined 23-year-old youth from Fresno, H. O. Collier, started a personal search for the plane after studying charts of the ill-fated flight and talking with various TWA personnel. Collier, in the first week of June, hiked alone into the snowy terrain northeast of the town of Wawona and on Sunday, June 12, he found the wreckage of the long-lost airliner at a site some 32 miles northwest of the original search area.
The shattered DC-2, still containing the remains of its nine occupants, lay partially buried in the snow on the southern side of the 9,709-foot Buena Vista Peak, located within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park. Clues at the site indicated that the TWA plane, while in a steep bank, had sheared off the tops of three pine trees and crashed into the peak approximately 200 feet below its summit, killing all on board.
Upon making his grim discovery, Collier then hiked 12 hours back to national park headquarters and informed officials of his find. On June 14, the remains of the nine crash victims, which included a brother and sister from Ohio who were both students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, were recovered and taken to a Fresno mortuary to be claimed by relatives.
Investigators speculated that the pilot, while diverting to the airport at Fresno, was blown off course in the storm and lost the radio signal that would have guided the plane to a safe landing.
Fatalities: 9 -- 6 passengers and a crew of 3.
Details and Probable Cause: The brand-new twin-engine Lockheed L-14-H2 Super Electra airliner (NC17394) was carrying Northwest Airlines and Lockheed Aircraft Corporation employees and family members. It took off from the Union Air Terminal (known today as Burbank Airport) bound for Las Vegas, Nevada, where it was to be officially turned over to Northwest Airlines and then flown on to the company’s headquarters at St. Paul, Minnesota.
The plane was flying in thick fog above Mint Canyon when it crashed at 3,300 feet in the Sierra Pelona Mountains 27 minutes after taking off from Burbank. The aircraft struck a ridge, bounded over a ravine, struck a second ridge and broke up, bursting into flames and coming to rest approximately 75 feet below the summit of Stroh Peak.
Rescuers reached the crash site at 7:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, May 18, but both pilots and all seven passengers on board, including a three-year-old boy and an infant girl, had been killed instantly. It was the third crash of an airliner to occur in the mountainous terrain north of Los Angeles in less than two years (see December 1936 and January 1937 entries above).
Among the victims were Frederick Whittemore, 42, a pilot and vice-president of operations at Northwest Airlines, and Lenna Squier, 34, the wife of Carl B. Squier, the vice-president in charge of sales at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Squier, an aviation pioneer and the 13th licensed pilot in the United States, was in Chicago on a business trip and Mrs. Squier was flying east to join him.
Fatalities: 9
Details and Probable Cause: United Air Lines Flight 6, utilizing a twin-engine Douglas DC-3A-191 (NC16066) aircraft, departed Seattle, Washington, on the evening of November 28 bound for San Francisco. After intermediate stops at Portland and Medford, Oregon, the plane continued south with four passengers and a crew of three on board.
Bucking high winds and rain and plagued with radio interference due to the atmospheric conditions, the aircraft inadvertently drifted off course. At 4:09 a.m., Captain Charles Stead radioed Oakland dispatch: “Should be over Oakland. Am dropping down to see what is below. Have 60 gallons of gas, reduced throttle. There is something wrong with this course.”
Several more exchanges between the errant airliner and Oakland dispatch ensued, and by 4:57 a.m., after picking up the Oakland radio range (a navigational beam), Stead reported, “Am almost on course.” By this time the DC-3 was flying at 1,800 feet along the California coast and had approximately 20 gallons of fuel left.
Twenty-two minutes later, Stead reported seeing a light (identified as a ship, the lumber schooner Lumberton) and dropped a couple of flares in a vain attempt to signal the vessel as well as illuminate a suitable landing area. “Shore ahead too rough for landing,” he radioed, and at 5:25 a.m., with its fuel supply exhausted, the DC-3 was forced to ditch in the Pacific approximately one mile offshore from Chimney Rock at Point Reyes in Marin County.
Upon ditching, all seven occupants of the DC-3 clambered through an overhead escape hatch in the cockpit and took positions on the wings and tail of the floating aircraft. However, as the plane drifted toward the rugged shoreline it struck several submerged rocks, knocking all of the survivors into the turbulent surf.
Captain Stead and passenger Isadore Edelstein were able to struggle ashore, but the remaining five -- the first officer, stewardess, and three male passengers -- were swept away and drowned. Ironically, the bobbing fuselage eventually was pushed to shore and beached itself, with its interior passenger cabin basically intact and relatively dry.
An investigation of the tragedy pointed to human error on the part of the pilot in command for failing to definitely establish the position of the aircraft through standard orientation procedures upon contact with the Oakland radio range, and human error on the part of United Air Lines flight dispatchers -- responsible for directing the operation of the trip -- for failing to properly safeguard the flight.
Fatalities: 5 -- the first officer, stewardess, and three passengers. • 1920s • 1930s • 1940s • 1950s • 1960s • • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s • Home • For further reading, please see the List of Sources used to compile these webpages. |