(Originally published by the Daily News on Saturday, Dec. 17, 1960; written by Joseph Kiernan, Edward Kirkman and Henry Lee)
In the world's worst aviation disaster, two airliners groping through a snowstorm toward International Airport and LaGuardia Field collided over the city at 10:34 A.M. yesterday, killing at least 133 persons — including six in downtown Brooklyn, where one of the planes, a jet half the size of a football field, set a square-block area on fire. It was feared that additional bodies would be found.
Of the 77 passengers and seven crewmen aboard the jet, a United Airlines DC-8, which exploded near Sterling Place and Seventh Ave., Brooklyn, spewing metal and flames through the neighborhood, only an 11-year-old boy survived. He was critically burned.
Ten miles away, 39 passengers and five crewmen perished on the other plane, a Trans World Airlines Lockheed Constellation which partly disintegrated in air and fell in wreckage —right on a runway at little Miller Army Air Field in Staten Island.
In Brooklyn, where the frightening crash of the jet demolished a church, wrecked 11 other buildings and touched off a seven-alarm fire, six persons died on the street, in buildings and in a flaming auto.
As Mayor Wagner proclaimed the neighborhood a disaster area, he expressed official fears that the rescue army of 2,500 police, firemen, physicians and civil defense volunteers would find other bodies in the rubble of the flattened buildings.
The Previous Worst
Wagner called the collision "the worst air disaster in the city's history." Reckoning in the feared ground casualties, it also was the world's worst aerial calamity. The previous record toll was the 129-victim crash of a U.S. Air Force C-124 Globemaster near Tokyo on June 18, 1953.
For United and TWA, it was the second grim rendezvous with aerial holocaust. In what was previously the worst civil airlines accident, two of their plans collided June 30, 1956, over the Grand Canyon, killing 128.
Last night, the Civil Aeronautics Board assigned 31 top investigators — the largest such assemblage of experts ever assembled — to cover the two crash scenes. An appeal was issued to the public to report any apparent plane debris to authorities — but leave it undisturbed.
In one of the girmmest ironies of the two-plane crash, the name of the church demolished in Brooklyn was The Pillar of Fire Church. A nearby bakery, barber shop, funeral home and apartment building were also ruined.
No One Saw Crash Itself
Though tens of thousands of New Yorkers heard or saw the flaming double climax of the collision, no one actually witnessed the crash itself, and federal aviation authorities, for the time being, refused to say more than "all the evidence points to a mid-air collision."
Neither plane had reported any trouble — both simply faded off the radarscopes at the International and LaGuardia control towers — and there was no immediate explanation of what had gone wrong to get them on collision course.
The feds promptly impounded taped transmissions from both ships in the hope of finding some clue to the disaster.
All that the sky detectives actually knew, however, was that the TWA Constellation, inbound from Dayton and Columbus, Ohio was coming toward LaGuardia on instruments for a 10:40 A.M. arrival.
And the United jet out of O'Hare Field in Chicago — first pure jet in aviation history to crash with passengers — was cleared for a holding pattern at 5,000-foot altitude. She was due five minutes later at International, where there was a 600-foot ceiling.
The TWA plane also was apparently cleared for this altitude, but the circles of their patterns should have kept them at least five miles apart.
Supposedly, authorities said, the two planes, laden with businessmen, holiday travelers and at least three infants, were safely separated for their arrivals at the two fields some 10 air miles apart.
Rescue Attempts Futile
What went wrong — whether it was ground or pilot or instrument error — could not be immediately determined.
As the wreckage rained down simultaneously many miles apart in Brooklyn and Staten Island — narrowly missing three schools — rescue attempts were prompt but futile.
The Hospital Department dispatched, every available ambulance, doctor and nurse in both municipal and private hospitals to the two scenes, including disaster units from Bellevue and Kings County Hospitals. Hospital Commissioner Morris A. Jacobs, who lives on Staten Island, personally directed medical emergency efforts there.
The Mayor hastened to Brooklyn, and sent his executive secretary, Frank Doyle, to Staten Island. As sightseers flocked to both sites, Police Commissioner Kennedy appealed to the public to stay away. Bridge and tunnel lanes were preempted for movement of emergency vehicles.
Direct Hit on Church
In Brooklyn, the wreck area looked as though a blockbuster had leveled the buildings. At 119 Sterling Place, the Pillar of Fire Church, a 2 ½-story brick structure, suffered a direct hit, and the explosion that followed dug a 25-foot crater, some 50 feet in diameter, where the edifice had stood.
An intact tail section landed right in the intersection of Sterling Place and Seventh Ave., while a 25-foot wing section knifed down through the roof of a four-story brownstone tenement at 126 Sterling, slicing the structure almost in half down the second floor.
At least 24 parked autos were destroyed, along with a funeral home, barber shop, bakery, garage and several 16-family apartment buildings. Screaming in terror, women ran into the streets with their small children. Some rushed to PS 9, which has 1,000 students, and St. Augustine's Parochial School, with more than 1,000. Both schools are close by. None of the debris hit the school buildings.
Saw a Boy Tumble Out
Among the wreckage, an estimated 300 residents of Brooklyn became homeless as a result of the crash on Sterling Place as their apartment buildings were crushed and burned.
Mrs. Amelia Helmes, who was standing at a corner, saw part of the plane hit the top of a red truck — and then, to her horror, a boy tumbled out of the wreckage.
"I rushed to him," she said. "His name was Stanley, he said. But he was not talking clearly. His mouth was bleeding. His hands were burned and cut. His clothes were on fire.
"Oh, it was awful!
"His face was badly burned, and the skin was peeling off. He had red curly hair and seemed about 10 or 11."
The victim, later identified as 11-year-old Stephen Baltz, the DC-8 survivor, who had been flying from Wilmette, Ill., to be with his mother for Christmas, was taken to Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. Last night, his condition remained critical.
Temporary Morgue
As police sealed off the stricken block to prevent looting, bodies were removed at the rate of ten an hour, to temporary morgues set up in a garage next to the demolished Pillar of Fire Church and in a bowling alley on Seventh Ave., near Flatbush Ave.
Later, they were transferred to Kings County Hospital morgue, and a seven-man disaster unit from the FBI aided police in the difficult task of identification.
For the living, St. Augustine's School was used as emergency headquarters, and police with loudspeakers directed bewildered residents of the neighborhood to report there. An estimated 300 homeless were given food and emergency medical treatment, and cots were brought in to house them overnight, if necessary.
Days after the crash occured, the disaster area at Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, Brooklyn, is littered with debris.
At the Staten Island Scene
In Staten Island, the other half of the tragedy was played out less dramatically. A New Dorp housewife, Mrs. John S. Bailey, saw the stricken Lockheed "turning around just like a toy." City Councilman Edward V. Curry described it as "a ball of flame" that "streaked through the air like a comet."
Apparently, other witnesses added, fire in the air exploded the two right engines and blew off the tail section.
"I saw a couple of people falling out of the plane," reported Clifford Beuth, an oil deliveryman.
It was blazing all the way down, he said.
2 Off-Duty Police Help
Two brothers, off-duty Patrolmen Peter and Gerard Paul, who live on Staten Island and were Christmas shopping nearby, were among the very first on the scene. With a small ladder, they scaled a 10-foot fence and, with an Army lieutenant, ran to one piece of wreckage on the Miller Field runway.
"I saw someone move," Peter Paul said later. "We jumped in and started pulling the people out who were moving.
"By this time, other people had arrived, and I borrowed a knife to cut the safety belts. We took out two men and a woman who were still alive. They were moaning and groaning.
Flames engulfed buildings wrecked by plane's crash on Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, Brooklyn. At least six people on the ground were killed by the crash.
Flames engulfed buildings wrecked by plane's crash on Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, Brooklyn. At least six people on the ground were killed by the crash.
"There was a lot of smoke and the seats were on fire. One man was lying on his back and trying to rise. The other bodies were badly burned. In all, we took out about six people. We carried them to helicopters."
The victims were taken to the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in St. George, but all were dead on arrival, or died shortly afterward.
"To me, it was nothing but a mass of rubble and human bodies," said Dr. Ernest Siegfried of the Public Health Service Hospital, who responded to the first emergency call.
"An Army tow truck pulled a huge curved side of aluminum away, and exposed many bodies, strapped in their seats and crushed and crumpled together.
"I observed that all the clothes were burned right off all the bodies. I've been involved in other disasters, and it appeared to me that this plane was burning before she hit. Of the bodies taken out, most were burned very badly about the head, shoulders and arms."
Only luck averted a Staten Island disaster similar to the Brooklyn fire, as the area is heavily populated, with three schools situated in an eight-block radius of the crash.
But the plane landed right on the field, a sub-post operated by Fort Wadsworth, about three miles away.
100 Soldiers Sent
Assistant Chief Inspector Walter Klotzbach directed 150 cops on the scene, and additional help rushed from the fort, including 100 soldiers. The Coast Guard dispatched several helicopters, and had 21 boats searching the nearby waters for possible survivors.
Thursday 17 December 2014
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/54-years-planes-collide-midair-city-article-1.2047397
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