For the truly morbid among us, I found this site after the subject of the famous who died in plane crashes came up in another thread the other day. This one will tell you who the famous person was who got killed in what type of plane, with date and circumstances of the crash. I think it goes back to the beginning of flight. Enjoy. Oh, and you should bookmark the home page. It has tons of useful aeronautical information other than this moribid stuff, though there is a page of pilots’ last words as played on the CVR.
ty sharky…interesting site…
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“Aviation in & of itself is not inherently dangerous. But, to an even
greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”
Well, for a few years part of my job was jumping on the next flight out of Houston to wherever the latest airliner went in, and I once got to a Delta flight that crashed at DFW within four hours. It was still smoldering, though most of those aboard survived. But quite a few didn’t. It was always, and will always be to me, such an awe inspiring, fearful sight, seeing something so huge laying out in a field broken into pieces like it had been thrown to the ground by an angry giant. I remember one crash in Denver in a blizzard, back in '87, a DC-9 that crashed before it was barely airborn, due to heavy icing. And laying just on the outside of the left side of the cockpit lay the dead pilot’s cap in the snow. For some reason, the memory of that dead pilot’s cap, lying right next to the broken off cockpit section, evokes more tragedy in me to this very day, than just about any horror my job as a journalist ever exposed me to, and that’s saying a whole lot. As I told my girlfriend once, I’ve seen things that would make your nighmares have nightmares. So, the point I’m trying to make is, even though I refer you to these sites, I do not do so as a joke. There is nothing amusing about people perishing in plane crashes. And, another memory that still affects me to this day: ever since the first time I flew in a modern tactical airplane, strapped into a MB ejection seat in the back of an F-4C, I have always felt safer in that confined, claustrophobic rig, than sitting in the back of a brand new 777. It’s all about feeling in control of one’s own destiny. And in the 777, I don’t have that nice yellow handle down between my thighs.
I’m a pilot, and I subscribe to the NTSB debriefer. My wife asks why I read such mundane, yet horrific material. I tell that most of these crashes were due to pilots second guessing their systems and environment. These reports sober me up to think that next time I’m in the cockpit, and I don’t have the answers right away, that I better not do a “what if” or a “maybe”.
Scott
I was on a plane coming back from Washington DC when they announced a delay for de-icing. It was cold out and I guess there were storms forecast or some such. As they made the announcement everyone on the plane groaned and complained. I remember thinking “What is the matter with you people?” They didn’ t mind trading a very real risk of a crash due to ice, for a half hour’s tardiness. Amazing.
That NTSB bulletin saved my life one fine spring day. I was taking off in a Piper Cherokee for a little local tooling around. Just at the moment the main gear left the pavement, my seat back collapsed backward. Though startled, I calmly reached for the instrument panel sill with one hand and pulled myself up, making sure not to deviate the yoke from my angle of climb. And how did that small magazine save my life? Like this:
Not two weeks earlier I read an account of a fatal crash that killed two people in the front seat and seriously injuring a passenger in the back. The pilot took off in a Cessna 172 and his seat back collapsed. Instinctually, in his panic, he reached for the closest thing to pull himself upright. That happened to be the yoke, which he pulled all the way back, stalling the airplane on takeoff, augering into the ground. Had I not read that, I almost surely would have made the same error, because I did not yet have enough piloting experience to think fast enough to realize that it was a suicidal move. Also, ever after, I have added the seat back to the standard pre-flight checklist.
Tom
To learn from another’s mistake is always a good thing; good on ya Sharkskin. Safety of flight is always the number one issue and if people are groaning that they have to wait an hour or so for the plane to be certified to fly, then so be it. At least they’ll be still alive to grumble and not become another statistic. Safety rules are written in blood.
That crash I mentioned in Denver was so senseless. There was (and is) so much pressure on airline pilots from the company to leave on time (Time is money, after all, as we are taught from birth in this country), an while this DC-9 was sitting waiting its turn to take off from Denver Stapleton, an hour passed, and though the plane had been deiced, the ice had time to form again even thicker. On top of that, neither of the two crew members had a hundred hours in the type. The co-pilot, if I recall, had about 10 hours in the DC-9. The airline should never have matched those two crew members.
But what made this crash all the more poignant, and angered me so much, was that while I was working for a little daily in Jerkwater, TX while still in college in 1981 or 82, Air Florida Flight 90, a B 737, went into the Potomac River and killed all but six people on board, plus at least one person on the ground, for the very same reason. Ice. That was five years earlier than the Denver crash. And, it just happened that the airline tried to palm it off on the pilot (they always do), whose mother happened to live in Jerkwater, TX. And I was the one reporter she could get through to, so she called sobbing, “They’re saying on the national news that my boy was a bad pilot. He was in the Air Force and he won a lot of decorations. How can they say that about my son?” And I had no answer for her, but I knew the truth: The airline had planted it in the media, and most reporters are not qualified to write about aviation. Then, the same crash happens again in another city a few years later, and more people die for reasons of economy. Regs are written in blood, true, but some just never get written at all.
Tom
Maybe nowadays (after 11 Sept 2001), much more attention is given to safety. It’s still sad that some procedures are missed and in some cases, ignored. Those that are in the military know and understand (for the most part) that there is danger associated with the work, but we don’t blatently forego maintenance or safety procedures. For civilian passengers trying to go somewhere for the holidays, etc…and the airlines pushing $$$$$ versus safety…it’s even more uncalled for. Maybe the airlines are starting, slowly, to wake up?
Sad thing is that sometimes the rules and regs are what cause the problems.
I was hanging around the airport one day waiting for my instructor to show up (an uncontroled airport, BTW). A Cessna 402 was taking off on the active. He called in taxiing onto the runway, he called in when he started his takeoff run. I was watching his takeoff run and saw motion out of the corner of my eye. An idiot in a T-6 was also taking off on an intersecting runway. They met about 100’ above the intersection. The vertical stab of the T-6 ripped the wing of the 402 open, and ripped most of the stab of the T-6 off. Both of them managed to land, nobody hurt.
The T-6 had radios but the pilot didn’t even have them on. Since it was an uncontrolled airport and under VFR conditions, by regs he could takeoff and land without radios. All he had to do was turn the damn radios on, but he didn’t. There is no excuse for allowing regs to replace intelligence.
The 402 pilot was a 30 year old ex-Air Force guy with about 3,000 hours (commercial, multi-engine, turbojet, CFII, and all the rest), and had his 6 year old son with him. He walked off the plane, looked at me, and said, “I’ll never get in another one”. After 20 years I can still see the color of his face …