| Accident summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | December 16, 1960 |
| Type | Mid-air collision |
| Site | Brooklyn and Staten Island New York City, New York |
| Total fatalities | 134 (including 6 on ground) |
| First aircraft | |
| Type | Douglas DC-8 |
| Name | Mainliner Will Rogers |
| Operator | United Airlines |
| Tail number | N8013U |
| Flight origin | Chicago O'Hare Airport |
| Destination | Idlewild International Airport |
| Passengers | 77 |
| Crew | 7 |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Second aircraft | |
| Type | Lockheed L-1049 |
| Name | Star of Sicily |
| Operator | Trans World Airlines |
| Tail number | N6907C |
| Flight origin | Dayton International Airport |
| Destination | La Guardia Airport |
| Passengers | 39 |
| Crew | 5 |
| Survivors | 1 (But died in hospital the morning after the crash). |
The 1960 New York air disaster, also known as the Park Slope Plane Crash, was a collision on December 16, 1960, between two airliners, United Airlines Flight 826 and Trans World Airlines Flight 266 over New York City, in which Flight 266 crashed into Staten Island and 826 into Park Slope, Brooklyn. The crash killed all 128 people on the two airplanes and six on the ground.[1]
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United Airlines Flight 826, Mainliner Will Rogers, registration N8013U, was a Douglas DC-8 carrying 84 people en route from O'Hare Airport in Chicago to New York International (Idlewild) Airport (now John F. Kennedy International) in Howard Beach, Queens. United had named the DC-8 jetliner after American entertainer Will Rogers.
Trans World Airlines Flight 266, Star of Sicily, registration N6907C, was a Lockheed Super Constellation carrying 44 people en route from Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, to New York's LaGuardia Airport.[2]
At 10:21 a.m. Eastern Time United Airlines Flight 826 advised its company radio operator that one of its VOR receivers had stopped working (although they did not notify air traffic controllers of the problem), making it harder to navigate in instrument conditions. At 10:25 a.m. air traffic control issued a revised clearance for the flight to shorten its course to the Preston holding point (near South Amboy, New Jersey) by 12 miles (19 km). Flight 826 was supposed to circle the holding point at an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,500 m) at no more than 240 mph (390 km/h), but overshot the point. United later said a ground beacon was not working (pilots testified on both sides of the issue).[3]
Weather conditions at the time were light rain and fog (which had been preceded by snowfall). According to information from Flight 826's flight recorder (the first time a "black box" had been used to provide extensive details in a crash investigation), the plane was 12 miles (19 km) off course and for 81 seconds descended 3,600 feet (1,100 m) a minute and slowed from more than 500 to 363 mph (800 to 584 km/h) when it collided with the right side of TWA Flight 266 at between 5,250 and 5,175 feet (1,600 and 1,577 m) in clouds about a mile west of Miller Field, a military airfield on Staten Island, at 10:33 a.m.[3]
The TWA Constellation crashed onto the northwest corner of Miller Field with some sections of the aircraft landing in New York Harbor on the Atlantic Ocean side. As it spiraled down, it disintegrated and dropped at least one passenger into a tree in nearby New Dorp.[3]
Later, a line of soldiers formed at one end of the field, searching the snowy ground for "bathtubs", blood red rimmed pits where human remains littered the field. As they marched across the ground they would shout out their discoveries, and the response was inevitably, "What have you got, a body, or a piece?" The bodies were brought back on stretchers, the pieces in bags.
Although witnesses speculated at the time that the crew of Flight 826 was attempting an emergency landing in Prospect Park, about 9 miles (14 km) away from the collision point, or at LaGuardia Airport, there is no evidence the pilots had control of the DC-8 at any time after the collision. The crash left the remains of the aircraft pointed southeast towards a large open field at Prospect Park, only blocks from the crash site. A Catholic high school teacher from St. Augustine High School less than two blocks from the crash, testified at government hearings that he saw the faces of the pilots as the plane approached the school, and that the wing dipped to clear the school building just before the plane crashed. This teacher's testimony was featured in a front page article and photo in the defunct NY Herald Tribune newspaper at the time of the hearings. A student at the school, who lived in one of the destroyed apartment buildings on the block of the crash site, reported to classmates that his entire family was in the only room of their apartment not destroyed by the crash and they thus survived. The crash left a trench covering the most of the length of the pavement on Sterling Place in the middle of the street. It shook the school so violently that occupants thought that a bomb had gone off or the building's boiler had exploded. There was no audible voice radio contact with traffic controllers from either plane after the collision, although LaGuardia had begun tracking an incoming fast moving unidentified plane from Preston toward the LaGuardia "Flatbush" outer marker.[4]
Flight 826 crashed into the Park Slope section of Brooklyn at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, scattering wreckage and setting fire to ten brownstone apartment buildings, the Pillar of Fire Church, the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry and a delicatessen.[5] Six people on the ground were killed, including Wallace E. Lewis, the church’s 90-year-old caretaker; Charles Cooper, a sanitation worker who was shoveling snow; Joseph Colacino and John Opperisano, who were selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk; Dr. Jacob L. Crooks, who was out walking his dog; and Albert Layer, the owner of the butcher shop located just off Seventh Avenue on Sterling Place.[6]
The only initial survivor of the tragedy was 11-year-old Stephen Baltz (born January 9, 1949) of Wilmette, Illinois. Baltz was traveling alone aboard Flight 826 to meet his mother and sister, who had flown to New York the day before, while his father was due to join the family on a later flight. The family was planning to spend Christmas in Yonkers with relatives.
Upon Flight 826's impact with the ground, Baltz was thrown from the plane into a snowbank, where local residents rolled him in the snow to extinguish his burning clothing. Though alive and conscious following the crash, he was badly burned and suffering from burning fuel aspiration.
Baltz was taken to New York Methodist Hospital, fifteen blocks from the crash site. From his hospital bed, he told rescuers that moments before the collision, he had looked out the window at the snow falling on the city:
Pictures of Baltz appeared on many front pages around the world such as the Syracuse Post-Standard repeating a story from the Associated Press in which he expressed concern about his mother, who was waiting for him at the airport. He gave the only description of the crash:
Hospital staff were unaware that Baltz's lungs had been seared by burning jet fuel, a life-threatening condition, which was later revealed at autopsy. He died of pneumonia the next morning.
An 8-by-14 inch commemorative plaque embossed with four dimes and five nickels on the rear wall in the hospital's Phillips Chapel memorializes Baltz. The coins were found in his pocket and placed in the chapel's donation box after his death by his father, an Admiral Corporation vice president.[8][9] During the week of 13 December 2010, the New York Times ran a series of articles to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the tragedy.
With a death toll of 134, the accident was the deadliest U.S. commercial aviation disaster at the time, topping the 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision that killed 128. That collision also involved a TWA Super Constellation and a Douglas aircraft (a DC-7) operated by United. There were 128 people aboard the two planes in both collisions.
Filmmaker and critic Hollis Frampton was scheduled to be on the United flight, but decided to delay his return to New York for one 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."[10]
Sir Edmund Hillary (one of the first two to conquer Mount Everest) had also booked a seat on Flight 826, but missed the flight after arriving too late at O'Hare Airport.
A granite memorial in nearby Green-Wood Cemetery (where United Airlines bought a plot to inter three unknown passengers on Flight 826 the same day of the crash) with all 134 victims listed was dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the crash, December 16, 2010. The memorial was paid for by the surviving family members.
United Airlines still uses Flight 826 today on its Guam-Tokyo (Narita) route.
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