The collision of two airliners over
the Grand Canyon 50 years ago led to an overhaul of the nation's antiquated air
traffic control system.
By Jennifer Oldham
Times Staff Writer
Click Photos
for pictures and details
June 3, 2006
On a day that would transform aviation history, fog hung over Los Angeles
International Airport. But it did nothing to dampen the festive mood as
passengers lined up eager to start their Fourth of July holiday.
At one ticket counter, 64 checked in for Trans World Airlines Flight 2 to
Kansas City, Mo. Next door, 53 registered for United Airlines' Chicago-bound
Flight 718.
The two sets of passengers probably saw each other as they walked breezily
through the terminal and outside onto the tarmac, where they boarded the
first-class-only flights on rolling staircases. At the top, flight attendants
requested their names, took their hats, and pointed out smoking lounges and
bathrooms with terry towels.
The propeller-driven planes took off three minutes apart. The TWA Super
Constellation, dubbed "Star of the Seine," flew northeast over the
San Bernardino Mountains. United's flight plan took the DC-7, known as
"Mainliner Vancouver," east over Palm Springs. Then they leveled off
and flew on almost parallel tracks toward Arizona's Painted Desert, dodging
scattered thunderstorms.
No one knows if, as they approached the Grand Canyon, anyone aboard was aware
that the two aircraft were creeping closer and closer together.
It was 10:30 a.m. on June 30, 1956.
At 21,000 feet, four miles above the world famous gorge, the DC-7, traveling at
469 feet-per-second, scraped over the Constellation, its left wing tip slicing
through the Connie's fuselage and detaching its signature triple-fin tail.
At 10:31 a.m., controllers received a radio transmission that was so garbled it
would take weeks to decipher: "Salt Lake, United 718, ah, we're going
in."
The
airliners plummeted into the desolate canyon 10 miles north of the Desert View
outlook on the South Rim. The force of the impact drove parts of the
Constellation 20 feet into the Precambrian granite, twisted silverware into the
shape of pretzels, and fused a dime and a penny in a woman's change purse. All
aboard both planes 128 passengers and crew members died.
The spectacular midair collision was the worst commercial aviation accident at
that point in the country's history. And for the flying public, it revealed a
dangerously antiquated air traffic system. Advances in aircraft instrumentation
after World War II allowed more pilots to fly in bad weather, even as
bureaucrats struggled to figure out how to keep track of a burgeoning number of
planes moving faster and carrying more passengers.
At the dawn of the jet age, aviation experts had repeatedly warned lawmakers
that a midair collision between two large, fully-loaded commercial aircraft was
inevitable due to increasingly crowded skies and traffic control procedures
that relied largely on radio communication rather than radar. After a plane left
the airspace encircling a large city airport, radar tracking stopped; its crew
was left to watch for other planes by looking out the windows.
Aviation historians would later write that the effect of the Grand Canyon
disaster was "as galvanic as if it had happened over Washington
itself." Congress would allocate $810 million to buy navigation equipment
and long-range radar, and begin a sweeping reorganization of the nation's
fledgling aviation system.
"The Federal Aviation Administration was created out of the ashes of that
Grand Canyon crash," said Sid McGuirk, an associate professor of air
traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
As the aircraft burned in the canyon that morning where the roaring Colorado
River met the sedate Little Colorado River, controllers radioed frantically in
search of the two planes, neither of which had reported in.
They wouldn't be found until dusk, when two brothers who operated an aviation
sightseeing company, Palen and Henry Hudgin, flew over the wreckage in their
tiny, fixed-wing craft.
"When we saw the fuselage of the United plane it had not burned up yet,
and was completely intact, including the pilot compartment," Henry Hudgin
said in a recent interview with The Times, noting that the fuselage had become
lodged in a 500-foot deep fissure on the side of a cliff. "We were both
really surprised the next morning when we flew out there to see it was totally
burned up."
On July 1, federal investigators, TWA and United representatives, military
units and hordes of reporters descended on the canyon. The rugged terrain
"created the worst recovery conditions in the history of airline
accidents," declared an article in the July 5, 1956, TWA employee
newspaper, "Skyliner."
Pilots made 76 trips into the gorge over the next 10 days in banana-shaped,
twin-rotor helicopters. Years later, some recalled that dropping 7,000 feet
from the rim to the river through turbulent, 120-degree air was more
frightening than missions they later flew in Vietnam, said Dan Driskill, a
Flagstaff, Ariz., paramedic who is writing a book about the crash.
Meanwhile, climbers tried in vain to scale a 1,000-foot Redwall limestone cliff
to reach the DC-7, which had rammed into a promontory on Chuar Butte halfway
between the 6,394-foot mesa and the river. Wreckage was showered across the
rocky slope and into the adjacent crevasse.
Climbers didn't reach the United site until July 5, when they discovered a
shelf above the wreck that was wide enough to support a helicopter. Boulder,
Colo., climber Dave Lewis, then 20, was among the first to arrive.
"I walked to the edge of the flat ground and I was suddenly staring at a
steep gully packed with blackened wreckage and all surrounded by spectacular
scenery," Lewis said in a recent interview. "It's indescribable if
you've never seen a plane crash that burned. It's just chaos. How do you
describe particular brands of chaos?"
The TWA wreckage, about 1 1/2 miles south of the United site and 500 yards
above the river on Temple Butte, was more accessible.
For several days, investigators were reluctant to speculate about what caused
the crash, until they found a mangled piece of the DC-7's left wing at the TWA
site. Embedded in a tear on the wing was material from the Constellation's rear
cabin ceiling.
After collecting aircraft parts and hauling them out of the canyon, as well as
tape recordings from air traffic control centers in Los Angeles and Salt Lake
City, investigators began piecing together what happened.
At
congressional hearings in Las Vegas a week after the collision, federal
aviation officials testified that when the planes hit, the pilots were flying
outside designated airways and several miles off course.
A few minutes after TWA Flight 2 lifted off the LAX runway at 9:01 a.m.,
investigators said, Capt. Jack Gandy had asked for a change in altitude from
19,000 feet to 21,000 feet to avoid thunderstorms. Seeing on their radar that
United Flight 718 was at 21,000 feet, Los Angeles controllers denied the
request. A Salt Lake City controller radioed a colleague in Los Angeles
"their courses cross and they are right together."
After he was denied the altitude change, Gandy asked to fly 1,000 feet above
the clouds. His request was granted, and he was told the United flight was in
the area, but not its altitude. Gandy climbed to 21,000 feet.
At the hearing, the Salt Lake controller testified he didn't warn the pilots
about each other because they had left controlled airspace to fly more directly
to their cross-country destinations and consequently he had no idea what routes
they would follow.
The public disclosure that so much of the nation's airspace was uncontrolled
shocked a country confident after victories in two world wars and overtaken by
Elvis mania, where efforts to build a federal highway system had dominated
Congress' attention. At the time, editorial cartoons displayed newly signed
highway bills next to airway plans covered with cobwebs.
In early 1957, the Civil Aeronautics Board a precursor to the National
Transportation Safety Board released a 25-page report that found the probable
cause for the accident was that the "pilots did not see each other in time
to avoid the collision." Investigators wrote: "It is not possible to
determine why the pilots did not see each other."
The evidence did suggest, they said, that "attempting to provide the
passengers with a more scenic view of the Grand Canyon area" could have
been a factor.
The report emphasized that under air traffic rules at the time, the pilots had
been required to separate themselves from other aircraft using a "see or
be seen" principle. This was necessary because the nation lacked the
controllers and equipment to track airplanes outside of designated routes.
Since the 1930s, air traffic at high altitudes had been controlled by a
rudimentary system based on radio communications. Pilots would periodically
radio their heading, altitude and speed to their company's ground station, and
the company would relay the information to air traffic controllers. The controllers
would scribble the details for each flight on strips of paper and place them on
a metal tray lined with horizontal slots. Each slot represented 1,000 feet of
airspace helping controllers visualize how to keep aircraft they could not
see separated from one another.
Aghast that the system was largely operated on such a primitive concept just
two years before jets were set to make their long-awaited commercial debut,
lawmakers ordered drastic upgrades.
Many of the changes including integrating the civil and military air traffic
control systems, and ordering radar and other equipment to help controllers
actually see each plane's location had been proposed for years but failed to
receive adequate funding.
It took decades for federal officials to install enough equipment and build
enough control centers to monitor all high-altitude traffic over the United
States. By 1971, airspace above 18,000 feet was reserved for aircraft carrying
transponders that were able to communicate a plane's flight number and location
to radar installations on the ground.
Word of the crash reached families of the victims slowly,
as what began as a mystery of missing planes hardened into grim reality.
Neil Davis' sister, Beth, 24, was one of two flight attendants on TWA Flight 2.
When he learned of the crash, Davis drove all night from his home in Ogden,
Utah, to TWA headquarters in Kansas City. Once there, George Levering, a TWA
manager, told him: "There is no hope: everyone was killed. Your sister is
gone."
Beth Davis, one of five siblings in the tight-knit family from upstate New
York, had been only a month away from leaving TWA to accept a Ford Foundation
scholarship to study teaching at Cornell University in New York.
"I went completely crazy," Davis recalled in a 1994 memoir he wrote
about Beth. "I jumped up and ran out of the office and out of the building
into the parking lot, not to my car or anywhere in particular, just away."
In Washington, D.C., another Davis sister, Jayne Szaz, didn't realize Beth had
been working on the Super Connie and was now missing until she received a call
from another brother, Wayne.
"I couldn't sleep I was so stunned," Szaz said. "When the
morning came, I went home on the train it took me nine hours to go from
Washington to central New York state."
After grieving with her parents and siblings over the death of the family's
"emotional center" Szaz took the first airplane ride of her life to
attend a memorial for her sister in Flagstaff, where the remains of TWA Flight
2 passengers are buried. Some United passengers were laid to rest in a common
grave at the Grand Canyon cemetery.
The accident hit TWA employees particularly hard. They lost 17 colleagues
flying as both passengers and crew, including Tom Ashton, an industrial relations
supervisor who had recently posed as one of the Andrews Sisters for a company
skit. Also on board was Joe Kite, an assistant to the construction director,
Kite's pregnant wife and his two daughters. When employees flipped their
company calendars to July on the day after the accident, they found a picture
of the Grand Canyon.
Fifty years later, the crash still scars the
Grand Canyon.
Wreckage remains scattered on the near-vertical walls of Chuar and Temple
buttes, the treacherous canyon so forbidding in 1956 that investigators stayed
just long enough to collect the human remains and several aircraft parts. To
prevent looting, the National Park Service closed the sites for 20 years. In
1976, park rangers asked the airlines to remove several large pieces, saying
tourists "may consider the visible aircraft remains as blight on the
natural scenic beauty of the Grand Canyon." Then they reopened the area. If you have not looked at the photos, Click Photos
for pictures and details
Even
so, flash floods that follow summer monsoons continually unearth pieces of
wreckage. By some accounts, 40% of the Super Connie remains, along with 85% of
the DC-7.
At the TWA site in 1990, hiker Mike McComb found a tan purse containing
identification, a TWA schedule, a stamp book, a scarf and several sticks of
gum. "It was kind of a time capsule," said McComb, a pilot who has
made the strenuous 50-mile journey to the site several times and flies tourists
over it daily.
"As I approached the TWA site, there were little teardrops of melted
aluminum that had splashed on the canyon," said Driskill, the Flagstaff
paramedic, of a recent hike to Temple Butte. "Then I saw solid puddles of
melted aluminum spilled down rocks. There were big chunks of aircraft aluminum
bigger than a person buried under boulders."
Family members remain similarly marked by that day.
"The world should benefit in some way from the untimely loss of a worthy
person; there should be a trade-off," Jayne Szaz wrote of her sister Beth.
"But search as we might, we could find no such meaning in Beth's
death."
Szaz has painstakingly collected pictures of Davis and letters she wrote
various family members and placed them in a three-ring binder. Included are
slides Davis took during her three years at TWA.
There are scenic spots in Germany and Italy, and a picture of the Grand Canyon,
which Davis shot from an airplane window several months before her death.
"Being the studious person that Beth was," her brother Neil wrote,
"she had annotated almost every picture and slide
. On this particular one
of the gaping canyon below, she had written: 'What a place to die!' "
The midair collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956 killed 128 people and
sparked air traffic reforms. Controllers knew the planes would pass near each
other, but the crash occurred when pilots veered off course, dodging storms and
possibly trying to give passengers a better view of the canyon.
Worst airline crashes over the U.S.
|
Deaths |
Date |
Location |
Airline |
|
|
273 |
May 25, 1979 |
Chicago |
American |
|
|
265 |
Nov. 12, 2001 |
Belle Harbor, Queens, N.Y. |
American |
|
|
230 |
July 17, 1996 |
Off East Moriches, N.Y. |
TWA |
|
|
156 |
Aug. 16. 1987 |
Romulus, Mich. |
Northwest |
|
|
135 |
Aug. 2, 1985 |
Dallas-Ft. Worth |
Delta |
|
|
134 |
Dec. 16, 1960 |
Staten Island/Brooklyn, N.Y. |
United/TWA |
|
|
132 |
Sept. 8, 1994 |
Aliquippa, Pa. |
USAir |
|
|
128 |
June 30, 1956 |
Grand Canyon, Ariz. |
United/TWA |
|
Note: Does not include deliberate deaths in terrorist attack at World Trade
Center.
Sources: Air Disaster Volume 4, The Propeller Era; PlaneCrashInfo.com; Air
Transport Assn.; ESRI; TeleAtlas; USGS
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