1960 New York air disaster

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United Airlines Flight 826
Trans World Airlines Flight 266
Summary
Date	December 16, 1960
Type	Mid-air collision
Site	Brooklyn & Staten Island New York City, New York
Fatal Injuries	134 (including 6 on the ground)
Serious Injuries	0
Aircraft 1
Aircraft type	Douglas DC-8
Operator	United Airlines
Registration	N8031U
Ship name	Mainliner Will Rogers
Passengers	77
Crew	7
Survivors	0
Aircraft 2
Aircraft type	Lockheed L-1049
Operator	Trans World Airlines
Registration	N6907C
Ship name	Star of Sicily
Passengers	39
Crew	5
Survivors	0

United Airlines Flight 826, Mainliner Will Rogers, registration N8031U, was a Douglas DC-8 en route from O'Hare Airport in Chicago to New York International (Idlewild) Airport in New York City, New York on December 16, 1960. Trans World Airlines Flight 266, Star of Sicily, registration N6907C, was a Lockheed Super Constellation en route from Dayton and Columbus, Ohio to New York's LaGuardia Airport. The two aircraft collided in mid-air over Miller Army Field, a military airfield on Staten Island, at 10:33 AM Eastern Time. All 128 on both aircraft and six persons on the ground were killed.

At 10:21 AM, shortly after radar service was terminated, Flight 826 advised its company radio operator that one of its VOR receivers had stopped working. This made it more difficult for the pilots to accurately determine the aircraft's position in instrument conditions. Four minutes later, air traffic control issued a revised clearance for the flight that shortened its course to the Preston holding point by 12 miles. Under the circumstances, determining the locations of the new clearance points would require the pilots to perform rapid mental calculations. Civil Aeronautics Board investigators hypothesized that these factors caused the pilots to err in their calculation of the location of the Preston holding point. This error caused the aircraft to overshoot the holding point and to fly into the path of Flight 266.

Following the collision, the crippled United DC-8 careened into the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, demolishing an apartment building and a church (ironically named the Pillar of Fire Church) and spewing wreckage all over a busy Brooklyn intersection (Seventh Avenue at Sterling Place), killing six people on the ground. Although witnesses speculated at the time that the pilots had been attempting an emergency landing in Prospect Park or at LaGuardia Airport, there is no evidence that the pilots had control of the DC-8 at any time after the mid-air collision.

TWA Flight 266 crashed into Miller Army Field, with some sections of the aircraft landing in New York Harbor.

The only initial survivor of the tragedy was 11-year-old Stephen Baltz of Wilmette, Illinois, a passenger on the United jet, who was thrown into a snowbank at impact. He later died in a local hospital.

With a death toll of 134, the accident was the worst U.S. commercial aviation disaster at the time, topping the 1956 midair collision between United Airlines Flight 718 and Trans World Airlines Flight 2 over Arizona's Grand Canyon that killed 128.

Filmmaker and critic Hollis Frampton was scheduled to be on the flight, but decided to leave the next day in order to see a retrospective of the work of Edward Weston in Minneapolis; he said of this decision that he was "never...able to decide whether Weston tried to kill me, or saved my life." ^[1]

United has not retired the use of 826 as a flight number. However, as of October 2006 no United flights currently carry the designation. The most recent route of United Flight 826 was on a San Francisco to Los Angeles route, and was last used on September 5, 2006.

United had named the ill-fated DC-8 after well known American entertainer Will Rogers. Along with Wiley Post he was killed in a plane crash near Barrow, Alaska in 1935.